“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

“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?

My fresher’s year at Edinburgh University offered a few rude awakenings. The first: learning the university had run out of self-catered accommodation. The next was that the uni’s solution was to have

I don’t live at home with my three younger siblings anymore. I have my own flat which is shoe-box-sized, but mine, and I can read there whenever I like. I’ve always been a reader, ever since my mum sh

There’s no telling what will make a nonfiction bestseller. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the late Erich von Däniken’s junk archaeology about “ancient astronauts” both seem implausible

Sibyls , the book born of Ruth Fainlight’s poems and Leonard Baskin’s prints, became a memento of friendship, beauty and sorrow for its author