496pp. Arden Shakespeare. £130. Janice Valls-Russell and Katherine Heavey, editors According to the ancient bio­grapher Plutarch, in Thomas North’s sixteenth-century trans­lation, Antony was often ...

Heather Parry’s Carrion Crow is a brutal, unflinching medi­tation on the phenomenology of womanhood: the inheritance of constraint, the conditioning of self-effacement, the body as both burden and ...

Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey (1947), James Wood’s Upstate (2018), Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021) – there is always a special interest in a novel written by an accomplished critic.

The notion of the universe as a book, an ancient trope that Ernst Robert Curtius traced in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), works in both directions. If the universe is a book, ...

Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection of poems, Rhizodont, is like her third, Edge, in that both contain poetic responses to scientific research. “Book 1: Carboni­ferous”, which constitutes the ...

Joseph Stalin died just over seventy-two years ago, on March 5, 1953. Incapacitated by strokes, he had not received timely medical treatment because colleagues were too scared to break into his dacha ...

Strewn with learned allusions, humour and demotic wit, Inventing the Renaissance is the work of a remarkable scholar who teaches history at the University of Chicago. We read that “Ada Palmer is an ...

Geoff Dyer is known for his stylish sentences and diverse subject matter. He has written fiction, nonfiction and essays. He’s ...

In her introduction to The Selected James Simmons (1978), Edna Longley said that in Simmons’s poetry “art and life never look like becoming polite strangers”. He regarded Yeats’s insistence that a ...

191pp. University of California Press. Paperback, £30 (US $34.95). Each spring, I teach a class on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. We spend the first few weeks looking at some very big stuff indeed – ...

Eimear McBride is captivated by the life and work of Joyce's biographer; Mark Nayler is hot on the trail of the wolf who walked alone ...