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.

When Ronald Blythe died in 2023, a few months after his 100th birthday, it felt as if a whole way of rural life would now go unrecorded and uncelebrated. Akenfield, his rigorously unsentimental ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

That falleth on the grass. But hardly anything has been written since in this beautiful manner, and nothing by Blake. Indeed, when the Nativity has stirred the imaginations of our poets at all, it has ...

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