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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A “koe” is a cry or a shriek. It can be, for example, the cry of a kiwi from the bush. Māori names for birds are often homonyms for the sounds they make. So “kiwi” is not unlike that bird’s “koe”. In ...

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 ...

Geoffrey Gorer, anthropologist of Englishness, once remarked that “though most English men and women cannot ‘let themselves go’, they love to think and read about people who do throw off inhibitions, ...

It is often said that English-language authors peddle in ideas and French authors peddle in words. Alice Zeniter is passionate about both. Marked deeply by France’s colonial history, she is an heir to ...

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 ...