Background chatter

“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

“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

My February issue of HistoryExtra magazine arrived today and I was fascinated to see the cover image informing readers of “Lucy Worsley’s hunt for a London serial killer”. The image (below) itself see

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

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

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