“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

Had Robin Holloway published Music’s Odyssey—described by its author as “an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music”—30 years ago, he might well have got away with it. By day

“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?

MODERN ART OCFORD/SUZANNE TREISTER; SUZANNE TREISTER, COURTESY OF ...

In 1990, the sculptor Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of the sitting room of a vacant London house in plaster of Paris to create “Ghost”, a work which the critic Jonathan Jones described as “the so

There was a night as a boy when I couldn’t sleep ahead of a football match, too wired by thoughts of the sporting heroics I might achieve—or fall short of—the next day. While tossing and turning in my