“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?

Dear Simon, Once again, the December 2025 issue had lots of memories to write about. Starting from the front, Gertcha! – I did love Chas and Dave, as did my husband. Of course, the family always watch

“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

Nine-year-old future star of the silent screen Charlie Chaplin, his mother Hannah, and older half-brother Sydney entered the Lambeth workhouse, south London, in July 1898. The boys were soon transferr

THE LONDON LIST Would you like to be ...

As a child, Camilla was captivated by Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. She says, "I have to admit, I ended up probably being a pony-mad child with Black Beauty. which I howled over, night after night after