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 ...

It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The man lived a long time for his era, from 1646 to 1716. That is seventy ...

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 ...

How Women Made Music, a collection of essays edited by the American journalist Alison Fensterstock, aims to help “women in music get their due”. The origins of the book trace back to NPR’s Turning the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written. Darío became the representative poet of modernismo, a movement that ...