In brief: literature

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

“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

Konstantin Vaginov Goat Song and The Works and Days of Whistlin Translated by Ainsley Morse with Geoff Cebula 376pp. New York Review Books. Paperback, £17.99. Had a new translation of Konstantin Vagin

“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?

Lola Young Eight Weeks Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds 336pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99. Lola Young has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2004. She is also an emeri

In January 1918, a few months after Lenin’s Bolsheviks had captured the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Rhoda Power left the house in Rostov-on-Don where she was employed as a governess and wandered throu