Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered ...

Book titles that begin “The Treasury of …” suggest a box that you open to find jewels inside. The Treasury of Folklore: ...

Standing in the full / glare of the war, I’m a surface / reflecting its awesome light”, Oksana Maksymchuk declares in Still ...

An ambitious novel of ideas, Aurélien Bellanger’s Les derniers jours du Parti socialiste (The Last Days of the Socialist ...

The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written ...

The hybrid is a strange concept. On the one hand it’s a commonplace, describing everything from cars to conferences. On the other hand, it is entangled with colonialism, where it has been used to ...

What many remember about the Vatican during the Second World War is the failure of Pope Pius XII to challenge or condemn the atrocities carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. What is less well ...

Steering the Craft is an updated edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s creative writing handbook, first published in 1998 and shaped by the workshops she delivered to students. Although the introduction ...

In 1841, Karl Marx got a doctorate for a dissertation about Hegel’s theory of the history of philosophy. He disagreed over details, but endorsed Hegel’s big idea: that every school of thought reveals ...

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, ...

J. G. Ballard once described Paul Pickering’s work as “truly subversive”. This would certainly be an apt description of his latest novel, in which he picks apart the morality of war and the creation ...