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

ny potential reader of A Glastonbury Romance is likely to be put off initially by its sheer size: this brick of a book runs to more than 1,100 pages, containing almost half a million words. Some autho

We rarely have a plan for our campervan adventures, preferring instead to point our noses in a general direction of travel and play it by ear. This summer in the UK was no exception as we left our hom

JOHN DOWLAND IS MY NAME: musician, composer, greatest lute player of my age in Europe, some say, when in England Elizabeth and James were on the throne. I died in 1626 when I was 63 and was buried on

David Farrier Nature’s Genius Evolution’s lessons for a changing planet 288pp. Canongate. £20. In David Farrier’s latest book, he warns us that humanity is endangering every facet of life on Earth thr

Enrique Vila-Matas Montevideo Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott 240pp. Yale University Press. £14.99 (US $27). “Words are poor mountaineers and poor miners”, lamented the young Franz Kaf