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.

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 ...

However much one might sympathize with their cause, it is hard to avoid the fact that many Civil War parliamentarians were terrible bastards. Take the men of Sir William Waller’s army, who, in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of my school students, Sam, comes to my Monday English clinic to work on his close reading. He expresses frustration at the process, which seems unnecessarily mysterious to him. He knows that ...

Nam Le’s novel The Boat (2008) opened with an aspiring author “dreaming about [writing] a poem” and being rudely woken by his visiting father, whose experience as a South Vietnamese soldier and PoW he ...

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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Arthur Machen’s “N” (1936), written towards the end of his career, is a “lost domain” story warning of what might happen to those who, while walking in London, “wander away from the friendly tavern ...