Literature & Poetry

A penetrating study of the images, symbols, pageants, and creative performances ambitious Elizabethans used to secure political power Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to mak

A new edition of the definitive study of the background to the writing of The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, now beautifully illustrated by Martin Mackrill .

Writing Modern Ireland examines the complex literary manifestations of Ireland and Irishness from the turn of the twentieth century to very recently. Together with examinations of the nation, the collected essays consider Irish identities that may be sexual, racial, regional, gendered, disabled and able-bodied, ...

Provides an introduction to the context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife of the novel "Middlemarch". This guide presents an account of its critical reception. It also discusses the cultural afterlife including film and TV adaptations. It includes points for discussion and suggestions for further study.

"The true story of two of the twentieth century's great writers exiled from Nazi Germany to a Belgian seaside resort, and the world they built there: written with a novelist's eye for pacing, chronology, and language--a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. It's the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan ...

'German military figures had a certain terrifying glamour,' wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor, recalling views about Germany during the First World War. When, he asked, had the bristling general replaced the 'philosophers and composers and bandsmen and peasants and students drinking and singing in harmony?' ...

Brownjohn's new book, intriguingly titled A Bottle, is one of his most varied and resourceful to date, featuring not only characteristically funny and entertaining poems and mysterious, gripping narratives (the title poem) but also moving tributes and elegies, love poems, and some absorbing social observation.

Juxtaposes religious belief and unbelief, transmutes quirky social observation into poetry, indulges jokes and fantasies, and praises - or commemorates - friends.

Includes 13-line poems that cover three years of Ludbrooke's day-to-day life in multicultural 21st-century Britain: a batch of near-love affairs, worries about the figure he cuts among friends, battles with work and alcohol - but finally a determination never to give up.

[-------]: placeholder for all the things we can't name. Rob Halpern's *Common Place* series is here selected down to a single short volume, ending with the new poem Weak Link.

Examines the influence of Elizabethan prose fiction on early modern literary culture, emphasising the role of the non-aristocratic reader, the importance of the marketplace in the production and reception of prose texts, and the growth of prose as the dominant mode of narrative presentation.

John O'Neill reads Montaigne's Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature and politics.

Roger Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing or of publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends.

Nostalgia and love of parish churches is deeply embedded in the British psyche. Following the success of Poems in the Porch, a collection of hitherto unpublished poems on parish churches by Sir John Betjeman, Kevin Gardner has now assembled a new anthology of poems on the same theme yet with a greater ...

Acclaimed critic John Sutherland gets his teeth into the literary puzzles of the greatest-ever Gothic novel

Once every ten years Granta publishes a list of the twenty best American fiction writers under the age of forty. In 1997 and 2007 Granta picked out such luminaries as Daniel Alarcon, Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Doerr, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Nell Freudenberger, Nicole ...

A poetic sequence that take as its 'subject' the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal car accidents.

This is Rowan Williams' third collection of poems, poems of subtlety and complexity - and passion. They range widely in subject, place and mood. The poet visits a martyrs' memorial and a prison in Uganda. He meditates on the story of St Serafim of Sarov at the rock where 'at night Serafim knelt on the ...

Jamie McKendrick's sixth collection starts from the far flung ('out there' is the nothing - or the something - of outer space), ascertaining the mood of an observer on Uranus, or the perils of medieval travel, or listening for the speech of alien landscapes.