Literature & Poetry

In this essay written during the worst of the London blitz, Orwell discusses socialism, patriotism, an English revolution and how to make the country a better place. His passionate argument about the need for class consciousness and huge political change is as relevant today as it was when the essay ...

In this perceptive essay collection, Orwell recounts a pivotal moment in his career as a police officer in Burma. He shares his experience of being treated for pneumonia in a Parisian hospital for the poor, and divulges into the absolute horrors of attending a public school for boys. Throughout, he shares ...

The Spectator Best Book of the Year and a charming, eloquent love letter to the stories we adore

A panoramic and poignant history of children's literature

In these vivid, real and sometimes surreal pieces, Daljit Nagra creates his own inimitable linguistic bhaji: where Shakespeare meets the Subcontinent in a range of forms from English sonnets to spectacular displays of 'bollyverse' or the tender love songs of the monsoon.

Everything anyone could possibly wonder about famous books and writers is in this collection of more than 300 lists—authors who wrote standing up, famous last words, writers who couldn’t spell, unusual work habits, sexual peccadilloes, unintended double entendres in the classics, bad reviews of future ...

A biography of one of England's greatest poets, uncovering his radical, political influence.

When the Baron decides to appoint a Lord of Misrule for Christmas, making a peasant into a King for twelve days, unruly jollity ensues.

The only truly global collection of love poetry, bringing together the most stunning and inspiring poems from all around the world

The world's most complicated nation is learning ways to describe itself. The novel and the outsider's eye no longer rule.

contributors write from the UK, Europe, Canada and Mexico, and reflect both on Lowry's 'voyage that never ends' and on their own journeys with and through Lowry's work.

A Vertical Art gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his acclaimed four-year tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry.

Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the 'only recent American poet - if you don't count Eliot - who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition'. This book compiles a comprehensive selection of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle onwards.

Leonard Cohen made his name as a poet before he came to worldwide attention as a singer and songwriter. This collection of his poetry was written in Montreal, Mumbai and during his retirement in Mt Baldy.

Tom Paulin's first collection since The Road to Inver in 2004, Love's Bonfire sets poems about early life and marriage beside up-to-the minute and minutely registered perceptions of post-settlement Ireland.

Described by Philip Pullman as 'the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkein', Alan Garner has been enrapturing readers with works like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet for more than half a century. Now, a group of the writers and artists ...

King Arthur's Death (commonly referred to as the Alliterative Morte Arthure) is a Middle English poem that was written in Lincolnshire at the end of the fourteenth century. A source work for Malory's later Morte d'Arthur, it is an epic tale which documents the horrors of war, the loneliness of kingship ...

From the gothic fantasies of Walpole's Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to examine how authors' personal experiences helped to shape the homes that have become icons of English ...

Edgar, the brooding young master of Ravenswood, retains none of his ancestral estates but a crumbling castle. Embittered by the lawsuits that have stripped him of his patrimony and shortened his despairing father's life, he determines to confront Sir William Ashton, the lawyer whose machinations led ...