Jennifer Buckley Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760 Ecologies of print 232pp. Edinburgh University Press. £95. Matthew P. Brown The Novel and the Blank A literary history of the book trades

Children’s appetite for reading is in alarming freefall, says historian Dominic Sandbrook

Collecting fields often have holy grails, and in medieval illuminated manuscripts one is the Roman d’Alexandre or Romance of Alexander. The 20cm-tall book, written in Old French and illustrated with 1

When William Caxton opened Britain’s first printing press 550 years ago, he helped the country form a shared language and literary culture, as a new exhibition reveals

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From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals