"Sometimes I'm tempted to throw away all I've written so far and start again, write quite a different kind of book, in the first person perhaps. Or write it in the third person but like a novel, with more freedom to go where a critical study could no...

James Boswell (1740-1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a gene...

From its beginnings in "Twilight" fan-fiction to its record-breaking sales as an e-book and paperback, the story of the erotic romance novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" and its two sequels is both unusual and fascinating. Having sold over seventy million...

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory – Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole's "The Birth of Theory" presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel's d...

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental – the product of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie contests these assumptions in "Cruelty and Laughter", a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic l...

Kiki Dimoula's poetry – the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature – is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, c...

"I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely". In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of...

"Dear Life" was Dennis O'Driscoll's ninth book of poetry. Like his earlier work, it engages with contemporary issues – the internet era, the compensation culture, global warming – as well as providing fresh perspectives on the timeless topics of work...

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known in the West today as the author of the novel "A Hero of Our Time". But at the time of his death, aged only 26, he was widely regarded as Russia's greatest living poet. He achieved almost instant fame in 183...

Considered by many to be among the greatest writers of the past hundred years, Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz explores the modern predicament of exile and displacement in a disintegrating world in his acclaimed classic Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz's...