“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

“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

● CERTAIN PHRASES, LIFTED FROM famous writers, ...

The beauty of Lancashire’s Lune valley emerges from ...

IT was a clear early spring day, the breeze light and the sands empty. Sea and land seemed to go on forever, their divisions blurred by light and distance. Brigitte Wetherby breathed in the salty air

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the