The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Discoverers demonstrates the truth behind the aphorism that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed. Boorstin goes on to uncover the elements of accident, improvisation...

In this lively exploration of America’s intellectual heritage, acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Jay Parini celebrates the life and times of thirteen books that helped shape the American psyche.Moving nimbly between the great watersheds in American...

Proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early...

The emperor Julian once claimed that of all things innovation was what he most abhored; the fifteen papers collected in this volume attempt to reveal various strands of innovation in Byzantine arts. Contributors include: A Kazhdan (Innovation in...

Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some...

"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...