Alex Clark and Lucy Dallas look forward to 2025’s most tempting reading, plan a Jane Austen road trip and resolve to sit up straight.

However much one might sympathize with their cause, it is hard to avoid the fact that many Civil War parliamentarians were terrible bastards. Take the men of Sir William Waller’s army, who, in ...

Nineteen fifty-six in Britain was a cold, grey year. Through February the temperature never rose much above zero; the bitter back end of winter segued into the wettest summer in a decade. Gerald ...

Now relegated to obscurity, Else Jerusalem’s novel Der Heilige Skarabäus, fully translated into English for the first time as Red House Alley, was a success when it was published in 1909. Influenced ...

Paul Valéry has sometimes been dismissed by readers as obscure, dry and overly theoretical, but there can be little doubt that he produced some of the greatest poems in the French language. Take “The ...

When Ronald Blythe died in 2023, a few months after his 100th birthday, it felt as if a whole way of rural life would now go unrecorded and uncelebrated. Akenfield, his rigorously unsentimental ...