"He avoids the pipes. He has his reasons. He has heard the story Of the octopus who was locked into a room For a week to practice. When they let him out the pipes had learned To play the octopus. The thing about musicians is They respond to glory"....

In "The Alexandra Sequence" John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the "mummers play", a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book's title takes its name from an area of Liverpo...

"Below the tree free-riding on the water a shadow plays, beguiling, ripe for idolatry. I believe the tree and note it down as the answer to its own question". Rebecca Watts's debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape,...

Matthew Welton is a poet enchanted by form and process. Many of the "Number Poems" abide by subtle patterns or constraints, creating symmetries in the arrangement of sentences, lines, words, or metrical feet. As with good architecture, however, Welto...

This passionate and monumental biography reassesses the life and legacy of one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth century Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocte...

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer boo...

A good novel brings to life not only the nature of its characters, but also the physical presence of all of the things surrounding them, from the smallest trinkets to entire landscapes".Object Lessons" explores this phenomenon and addresses a fundame...

Salma is a major Indian political leader, who in 2003 faced obscenity charges and violent threats for her collection of erotic poetry. Undeterred, she's back with a beautiful, evocative, and poetic novel – now available for the first time in English"...

"I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean". So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge for the Sephardic Jew...

From "Let Me Hear You": Outside is inside now The pyramid whose point we are is weightless and invisible and has become itself the night in which alone together on a high plateau we go on shouting out whatever name those winds keep blowing back into...