In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered – the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, w...

"Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch... a "Trinidad" being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my...

In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul's of a book that had been long in the making. "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies" was the first collec...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

"I address you across more than three thousand years, you who live at the conjunction of the Fish and the Water-carrier", speaks Daedalus, an artisan, inventor, and designer born into an utterly alien family of heroes who value acts of war above all...

"All art and the love of art", Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal "Musings on Mortality", "allow us to negate our nothingness". As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immer...

Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of...

Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as "a sup...

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-l...

In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men", th...