In "How Now!" Alan Moore treats themes of love, evil, and personal loss with gentle humour and tough seriousness. He evokes memories of Ireland in the sixties, seventies and eighties, capturing flashes of awareness from childhood, youth and adult yea...

When Bob Capek's mother is killed in a hit-and-run accident in 1956, his father moves the family from Virginia back to his hometown of Mauch Chunk, a small town in the middle of the eastern Pennsylvania anthracite coal region. From the moment Bob boa...

Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in this controversial study of ring composition, a techn...

Gabriel Josipovici's stories play hide and seek with the reader. Whether they take place in a seedy London nightclub in the sixties, in a brothel in Hamburg during the First World War, in the fevered world of Shakespeare's mind as he writes "Twelfth...

"Some Do Not...", the first volume of "Parade's End", introduces the central characters: Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant mathematician; his dazzling, unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It starts with the cataclysmic...

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages".The Ideas in Things" explores apparently inconsequen...

Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the earl...

Eleanor Wilner's poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and pr...

John Ashbery's "Collected Poems 1956-1987" contains the complete text of the poet's first twelve books, from "Some Trees" (1956), selected for publication by W. H. Auden, to "April Galleons" (1987), and including "The Vermont Notebook" (1975) with th...

Peter Sansom's "Selected Poems" brings together twenty years of quintessential Sansom, a poet who has made the local and familiar his own resonant territory. Supermarkets and darts matches, life with teenagers and family funerals, the common ground o...