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.

From time to time pessimists declare the literary novel dead and drowned. Currently such pundits distrust its capacity for survival in our tough, market-driven publishing climate, in which sales ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

It was Christmas Day and my mother was carving the turkey. We were all gathered around the extendable G Plan dining table, with its leatherette seats, party hats on, the lemonade and the heavy sweet ...