I have recently chosen exhibition catalogue as books of the year, honouring a neglected genre. This year catalogues have tended to be substitutes for the original show, rather than souvenirs. I didn’t ...

544pp. Little, Brown Spark. £30. The death of God, announced by Nietzsche in the 1880s, is still proving to be traumatic. In contrast, the death of Economic Man will be a balm to the soul. When the ...

“… whose name in arms through Europe rings …” – Milton Across moat, where black swans preen on morning’s mirror, ...

In his introduction to this collection of essays and reviews Jamie McKendrick is at pains to explain the philosophy behind his writings, and the fact of ...

Library renewals The heroic story of the men who saved thousands of manuscripts from being destroyed by al-Qaeda ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Susannah Gibson’s new book is a biographical history of the women who formed and hosted some of the most famous London salons in the eighteenth century. Following work on this subject by Norma Clarke, ...

In 1942 the real estate magnate and philanthropist Alfred Knight purchased a copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles in its second, expanded edition (1587). He was building a collection of rare books ...

Of books about Venice there seems to be no end, but few offer significant new insights. One that does is Ronnie Ferguson’s Venetian Inscriptions: ...

and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...

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