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

A biography is a daunting task for any writer. How can you summarise a life? Can you realistically cover all of the source material? If the subject is well known, there are probably rival biographies.

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

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In 1966, an essay far ahead of its time appeared in the pages of the New Left Review (NLR). “Women: The Longest Revolution” was an analysis of how women are produced as a class. Its author, Juliet Mit

“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?