"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose...

* * * Winner of the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books * * * Stuff Matters by Mark Miodnownik is a unique and inspiring exploration of human creativity. 'Enthralling. A mission to re-acquaint us with the wonders of the fabric that sustains...

A powerful reimagining of the world in which a young Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution.When Charles Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books of the day were the Bridgewater Treatises...

Text: English, French (translation)

All authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves ‘Poets and Lovers’, rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with...

Novels are often said to help us understand how others think—especially when those others are profoundly different from us. When interpreting a character's behavior, readers are believed to make use of "Theory of Mind," the general human capacity to...

Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues that Victorian sensation novels – long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine – develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even...

Necrophilia is not one of my failings, but I do like graveyards and memorial stones and such...Following the publication In My Mind's Eye, her acclaimed first volume of diaries, a Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2018, Jan Morris continued to write her daily...

Book by Adam Gopnik

James Hart's Oxford Companion to American Literature is a classic, which, in its 45-year lifetime, has offered a matchless guided tour through American literary culture, past and present, popular and polite. Reviewing the Fifth Edition (1983) in The New...

Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused...

"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing." --Rashid Khalidi, New York Times bestselling author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine From the...

As delightful and playful as it is profound and serious, The Language of Names is an absolute original -- a fascinating book that reveals us to ourselves, that demonstrates the endless variety of ways in which names shape our daily lives. Drawing on...

You can tell a lot about somebody in a minute. If you choose the right minute. Here are 228 of them. Join Neil Strauss, "The Mike Tyson of interviewers," (Dave Pirner, Soul Asylum), as heMakes Lady Gaga cry, tries to keep MÖtley CrÜe out of jail & gets...