I have recently chosen exhibition catalogue as books of the year, honouring a neglected genre. This year catalogues have tended to be substitutes for the original show, rather than souvenirs. I didn’t ...

In his introduction to this collection of essays and reviews Jamie McKendrick is at pains to explain the philosophy behind his writings, and the fact of ...

Library renewals The heroic story of the men who saved thousands of manuscripts from being destroyed by al-Qaeda ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Of books about Venice there seems to be no end, but few offer significant new insights. One that does is Ronnie Ferguson’s Venetian Inscriptions: ...

and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...

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Paris was never really Camus’s cup of tea, and certainly not when, newly arrived there in the spring of 1940, he was living in a drab hotel room in Montmartre and doing humdrum secretarial work at the ...

When I was a child I wanted to be a cartographer. I drew maps of my surroundings – bedroom, home, neighbourhood, city, country, continent – with “Here be ...

The expression “Don’t get me wrong” is a good place to start – an ethical mandate as well as a critic’s dictum. In its efforts to enforce informality while insisting on the possibility of estrangement ...

The sparely written and enigmatic prose fictions of Rachel Ingalls (1940–2019) famously resist description, let alone classification. The worlds they ...