“A deluge of printed matter pours over the world”, F. R. Leavis proclaimed in his doctoral thesis of 1924. An excess of low-quality verbiage, in the view of this young literary scholar, was doing harm

Gerri Kimber Katherine Mansfield A hidden life 304pp. Reaktion. £20. Whenever a new biography of a well-known literary figure is published, the reader always hopes that the author may have included so

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

THROUGHOUT history, women have paved the way to a brighter future in politics, science, society, the arts, literacy and countless other fields. We’ve had Rosalind Franklin, the chemist responsible for

Times change and books change with them. The Horse’s Mouth, which the Everyman editor, Christoper Reid, describes in his introduction as “by far the best known volume” of Joyce Cary’s first trilogy of

What began as a simple attempt to trace my paternal grandfather online has unfolded into a web of lost marriages, mysterious deaths and unexpected headlines,” says Mike Medland. Born in 1949 in India