Fowl play

“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?

LETTERS

“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

“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

During my adult life I must have read – strictly for pleasure – hundreds and hundreds of crime novels that were written during the ‘Golden Age of Crime’ (1920s-50s). That’s no exaggeration. And not on

“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