Literary Criticism

The original punk poet, now a beloved national treasure, this is the outstanding long-awaited collection by the inimitable Bard of Salford, Dr John Cooper Clarke

'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in UlyssesIn Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. From Wilde's doctor father, a brilliant st...

An in-depth look into the life and writings of the bestselling author of the Discworld novels, Good Omens, and Nation.The Magic of Terry Pratchett is the first full biography of Sir Terry Pratchett ever written. Sir Terry was Britain’s bestselling living author*, and before his death in 2015 had ...

Proof that poetry can change the world.It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and ‘Kubla Khan’, as well as Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of ‘Tintern Abbey’,...

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training w...

It was December 1937 when the young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees and walked into the bitter winter of the Spanish Civil War. With great vividness and poignancy, Lee portrays the brave defeat of youthful idealism in Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’. Writing in the Literary Review, John Sweeney pr...

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfathe...

'Moss writes so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be. - The Times‘Devastating, funny and full of brilliant insights . . . a brave and important book.’ - Melissa HarrisonIn the household of Sarah Moss's childhood she learnt that the f...

Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died. Although he specified an unpretentious funeral, it ...

No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly and brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. They are like us, only more so - their actions and adventures scrawled across the heavens above. From the birth of the universe to the creation of humankind, Stephen Fry - who fell in love with ...