In Gaza, parents have taken to writing their children’s names on their legs in black marker pen so, if the family is separated during an Israeli bombing, they have some hope of finding each other ...

There has been a great deal of institutional handwringing since the Australian writer Richard Flanagan won – and politely accepted – the 2024 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in November, but ...

Can a circle, a two-dimensional object, deepen as well as enlarge? Can the façade of a church be “toothsome”? These and similar questions may occur to readers of Adrian Duncan’s third novel, The ...

Ever since Russia’s reannexation of Crimea in 2014, the international conversation has centred on the rival claims of Russia and Ukraine to the territory. Yet as the Ukrainian government belatedly ...

The Philosophy of Translation begins with an anecdote. Damion Searls, at this point a young man pondering a career in languages, asks Edith Grossman to go over a translation of his, and the ...

Mineke Schipper draws on a lifetime’s study of stories and proverbs across the world to chart the ways in which ideas about women, creation and power have been deployed over time. From Palaeolithic ...

In Thrall was first published in 1982, when its author, Jane DeLynn was in her mid-thirties, but it is set in 1960s New York, the backdrop of the author’s adolescence. It is undeniably a period piece, ...

After retiring as co-editorial director of Publisher’s Weekly in 2014, Michael Coffey read almost nothing but books by or about Samuel Beckett for three years. This endeavour prompted Samuel Beckett ...

For the past few months my Friday mornings have been romance marathons. Middle English romance, to be more precise, the subject of a senior seminar that meets for three hours at the end of the week.

In his rollicking memoir A Pound of Paper (2002), the Australian writer John Baxter recalls being in a bookshop in Sydney one day in 1987. A “white chauffeur-driven Mark 5 Jaguar” pulls up. Out of it, ...