Promising comfort is what a good stew should offer – but boeuf en daube, from Provence, with its cragged hunks of meat bespangled with olives and doused in shimmering, sepia-coloured broth, yields (if ...

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 ...

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was “a man who lived a woman’s life”. This is how Lucy Hughes-Hallett introduces her richly multilayered, Life of the royal favourite who was only thirty-five ...

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 ...

In the first full-length collection by Camille Ralphs, the poetry editor of the TLS, the care with which individual poems are crafted is balanced by a sensitivity to overall structure. After You Were, ...

Doors – as means of escape or entrapment, of release or privacy – proliferate in Roddy Doyle’s new novel. At the beginning of The Women Behind the Door, in which three older women are en route to ...