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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...