In 1935 Varian Fry arrived in Berlin as a newly minted Harvard graduate, eager to report on the escalating political unrest that had gripped Germany since Hitler’s rise to power. He was unprepared for ...

Depending on where your interests lie, Robert Aickman (1914–81) is notable either as co-founder and champion of the Inland Waterways Association, a group which at their inaugural meeting in 1946 made ...

It has been more than twenty years since Rachel Cusk upset the applecart of parenting literature with her stark, uncompromising memoir A Life’s Work (2001), which Anne Enright soon followed with the ...

In 1977 Ted Hughes published the first selection of Sylvia Plath’s prose in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Two years later he added a new cache of her work to an expanded second edition. Twenty ...

Mary Wollstonecraft – an unmarried, middle-class Englishwoman without a formal education – secured her place in the canon of political and economic theory by writing the first book-length response to ...

In 2023 France celebrated 150 years since the birth of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a writer who enthralled readers with frank, provocative explorations of desire, friendship and other pleasures of the ...

add up to. Some days I almost believe the ocean is real, that there really is all that fishing to be done. And some days the sun just hits the buildings all wrong. As usual the sky is a total mess and ...

Introducing his excellent anthology of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets (1967), Auden properly addressed a problem of definition: what is a “minor poet”? Or, to ask the same question the other way round ...