For nearly half a century Philip French's writing on cinema has been essential reading for filmgoers, cinephiles and anyone who enjoys witty, intelligent engagement with the big screen. His vast knowledge of the medium is matched by his love for it....

June 1978: Frederic Raphael is in a studio for the dubbing of his television play "Something's Wrong", and a routine moment is captured by his wry alertness to vanities and foibles. "Ifs and Buts" continues the sharply stylish extracts from the journ...

Born in Baghdad in 1945, now living in London, Fawzi Karim is one of the most compelling voices of the exiled generation of Iraqi writers. In the first collection of his poetry to appear in English, his long sequence "Plague Lands" is an elegy for th...

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence "Raptors" depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grot...

"Torchlight" explores the haunting persistence of memories, and the acts of remembrance which preserve and shape them. In his fifth collection, the Northern Irish poet Peter McDonald ranges across a wide poetic landscape, from Belfast in the troubled...

Iain Crichton Smith's "Collected Poems" was awarded the Saltire Prize when it was published in 1992. This completely revised and enlarged edition includes seventy additional poems, mostly from the four books the poet published in the 1990s: "Ends and...

Peter McCarey's first full collection, comprising work from his five pamphlets, is an exhilarating journey on the U-bahns and runways of language: "In a matter of hours / they can take you anywhere". Collected Contraptions opens with water, rain and...

"No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country... Nor for the world, I dare say...", says Christopher Tietjens to a war-damaged fellow officer, under fire on the Western Front. "No More Parades" continues "...