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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of my school students, Sam, comes to my Monday English clinic to work on his close reading. He expresses frustration at the process, which seems unnecessarily mysterious to him. He knows that ...

Nam Le’s novel The Boat (2008) opened with an aspiring author “dreaming about [writing] a poem” and being rudely woken by his visiting father, whose experience as a South Vietnamese soldier and PoW he ...

In a letter to John Thelwall in 1797 from the cottage in Nether Stowey where he was living with his wife Sara and their young family, Coleridge said he supposed he would have to become a Unitarian ...