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.

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 ...

From time to time pessimists declare the literary novel dead and drowned. Currently such pundits distrust its capacity for survival in our tough, market-driven publishing climate, in which sales ...

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 ...

Sphen the gay penguin died earlier this year. He was eleven years old. He and his partner, Magic, had shared the raising of adopted chicks at Sea Life Sydney Aquarium. Together they became symbols of ...

The Argentine novelist, journalist and librettist Pola Oloixarac pulls no punches. (Unimpressed by Han Kang’s recent Nobel prize, she condemned the new laureate as a “middle-brow author” who writes in ...

In Second Act: What late bloomers can tell you about reinventing your life, Henry Oliver persuades us that late-life reinvention is not only possible; it is to be encouraged. “We wouldn’t advise ...