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

Quiz of the week 1) Which Shakespeare play ...

Here’s a round number to celebrate: Poems on the Underground was launched forty years ago. “Up in the Morning Early” by Robert Burns, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “This Is Just To Say” by Wil

Michael D. C. Drout The Tower and the Ruin J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation 384pp. Norton. £25. Giuseppe Pezzini Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation 456pp. Cambridge University Press. £30. Michael

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“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?