Downtools

“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

When writer Sheila M Averbuch and her husband moved into their Pencaitland home in East Lothian over 20 years ago, the garden was little more than a flat upper lawn with a steep slope down to the bung

“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?

EACH year, before the holiday brochures landed, John’s seed catalogue arrived in the post. Ellen waited, knowing its arrival would bring a flood of memories she wasn’t strong enough to deal with. She

It is hard to overstate the potent timeliness of Lottie Delamain’s book. Against a backdrop of unsustainable human activity and climate crisis, this is a well-researched and beautifully presented coll

REAL readers' gardens! Pruning roses A plant-packed suburban ...