Rod Mengham's new offering comprises two complementary halves, one is a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound, on Dartmoor) and the other is a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. 'Grimspound' is a four-p...

"I wish I were a dancer to let lines fall like that. / But I am dressed like you, roughly for the North" "Roughly for the North" is a tender and complex portrait of an Arctic and sub-arctic world. Full of lush language and imagery, each poem is an a...

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances – which should invite consolation, revelation, an...

Very little is known about Aesop who was supposed to have been a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century BC. It is his fables (and those attributed to him) that have come down to us through the centuries. In this version, a fabulist from...

Set in mid-nineteenth-century Assam, when new concepts of modernity are increasingly challenging tradition, "Swarnalata" tells the story of three women from very different social backgrounds. Each of them swept up in the whirlpool of change, they her...

"On the night Li Bai tried to embrace the moon / in its fullness on the surface of the Yangtze River, / blossoms scented the air, and beyond the moon / pale stars powdered the sky. That faint shiver / of white near the surface was a dolphin rising. /...

In 1960s Karachi, a place of ever increasing violence and political and social uncertainty, a beautiful and talented artist, Tahira, tries to hold her life together as it shatters around her. Her marriage is quickly revealed to be a sham, a trap from...

In the nineteenth century, richly-drawn social fiction became one of England's major cultural exports. At the same time, a surprising companion came to stand alongside the novel as a key embodiment of British identity: the domesticated pet. In works...

A bright young student, a globetrotting star, and a highly respected married couple – each deeply immersed in the tradition of Hindustani classical music".A Monsoon of Music" tells the story of these four musicians whose lives intersect in the small...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! From "Howard's End" to "Brideshead Revisited", this book explores the leitmotif of the English country house in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, with a focus on the works of E....