I’m awake. Very awake. It’s early on a wind-whipped Sunday morning and I’m neck-deep in the sea off the Isle of Man’s north-east coast. The rain is steady, the swell is heavy and the water is gaspindu

You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a

Catherine Clarke A History of England in 25 Poems400pp. Allen Lane. £25. Mark Forsyth Rhyme and ReasonA short history of poetry and people (forpeople who don’t usually read poetry)368pp. Allen & Unwin

Without the generosity of one remarkable man, Sir James Roberts, the Brontë Parsonage Museum might never have come to be. Roberts’ own rags-to-riches story sounds like something from a book. He was bo

George Saunders Vigil 192pp. Bloomsbury. £18.99. Four years after publishing Lincoln in the Bardo (TLS, March 10, 2017), George Saunders hinted that he was drawn to writing a longer second novel, capt

These days, there’s a lot of talk about the politics of personality, but standing in an extensive cave system near West Wycombe, we were transported to a time when politics was at the centre of a scen