Hugh Latimer (1490-1555), with Cranmer and Ridley, is remembered as one of the most notable martyrs of the Reformation. He was utterly fearless in an age of grim persecutions, more noted for candour than tact. Once he had been convinced of the truth...

We are inside a pre-biotic chemical reaction some 4,500 million years ago, as it suddenly forms a membrane and becomes a prokaryot cell. Then a eukaryot cell. Then a multicellular organism. That's for the first chapter, and from the cell's viewpoint....

Ford Madox Ford's post-war masterpiece, "Parade's End", is recognised as one of the great British novels about the First World War. This selection from his other extensive writings about the war, published and unpublished, sheds light on the tetralog...

The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence, was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The...

The place: Palermo, 1783. The barons reject the reforms of the principled viceroy Caracciolo, pursuing their feuds and petty plotting. Their wives indulge in forbidden French novels. And porcine abbot Vella, forty years old, is drawn like a fly to th...

These novels depict one of the strangest and most terrifying epochs in the history of Europe, as the Roman empire fell into the hands of cruel, mad, incompetent emperors: Tiberius, Caligula, Nero. In these dangerous times, Graves's hero, the schola...

The third and final volume of McDiarmid's previously uncollected prose covers the decades from 1937 to 1978. This text includes: assessments of the contemporary political and literary scene, from the Spanish Civil War through MacDiarmid's call for an...

Josipovici's novel is based on the life of Pierre Bonnard, the painter of enchanting domestic interiors and innocently unsensual nudes. A thoughtful and deeply felt piece.

Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, "The English Novel" (first published in 1930) is his most satisfying. He wrote it while travelling: memory plays a large part. It does not smell of the lamp or the library. Our guide-a major innovative novelis...

John Lyly (1554?-1606) has come to seem an incidental player in a literary scene dominated by Shakespeare. But as the sixteenth century drew to a close, the relative status of the two writers was less defined. Lyly was the principal court dramatist...