“A deluge of printed matter pours over the world”, F. R. Leavis proclaimed in his doctoral thesis of 1924. An excess of low-quality verbiage, in the view of this young literary scholar, was doing harm

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

“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

“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?

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