Marcus Paul, editor John Buchan Reconsidered Thirty-nine years of war and peace 1901–1940 328pp. Handsel Press. £27. John Buchan The Strange Stories of John Buchan Edited by James Machin 256pp. Britis

“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?

“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

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

THE LIBRARY OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY Tragic moments ★ ...

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.