"In The story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton" (1943) Robert Graves – half a century before Carol Ann Duffy – creates a Mrs for a famous Mr, a Mr who Graves regards as one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon. Certainly his Mrs...

This selection from the most productive Christian pen of the nineteenth century is also an introduction to one of its most compelling and troubled minds. John Henry Newman (1801-1891) was a dominant figure in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic...

Mycology, psycho-analysis, music, mythology, linguistics, Christianity, occultism, Majorca, esoterica... This book for the first time selects the best from the more than five hundred essays which Robert Graves wrote about areas of culture which engag...

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....

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...

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...

Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is best known for his graceful, lucid if not always practical book "The Compleat Angler". It has stayed in print since it first appeared in 1653. More than just a writer of devout pastoral, Walton is one of the fathers of mo...

Thanks to T. S. Eliot's "For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order" (1928), the name of the great divine (1555-1626) lives, but his work is little known. This selection, the first for many years, reintroduces Andrewes as a substantial, engagin...