With precise and evocative prose, "Cold Spell" tells the story of a mother who risks everything to start over and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them both. From the moment Ruth Sanders rips a glossy photo of a glacier from a magazine, she...

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism – blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm – early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body", Gail K...

The poems in Kelly Grovier's third collection share a fascination with the mysteries that underlie our everyday existence, that "other world" we sense in the "undeciphered sands" shifting at our feet. By turns lyrical and philosophical, elegiac and p...

"The true haunts of the poetic powers", Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, "are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild T...

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will div...

In Can Xue's extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other's fantasies, carrying on conversations that are "forever guess...

This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or emigres displaced from their cultural and geographical origins. The subjects include poet John Rety (...

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey" to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The giving and taking of hospitality are sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and...

In this study, David Seale argues that Sophocles's use of stagecraft, which has thus far received little attention, was as sophisticated as that of Aeschylus or Euripides. His discussions of the physical and visual elements of Sophocles's seven plays...