“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

“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

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

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

“And there are other things even worthier of conservation.” Having devoured At Home (1958), the autobiography of the novelist William Plomer, E. M. Forster wrote to his friend Plomer to tell him the e

● CERTAIN PHRASES, LIFTED FROM famous writers, ...