Showing 1–12 of 28 resultsSorted by latest
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£24.95
‘Writers Revealed’ tells the stories of the best-loved writers in English literature, investigating their enduring appeal from the sixteenth century to today through the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the British Library. Intimate handwritten manuscripts, letters and notebooks as well as rare first editions of books from the British Library are paired with the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of author portraits. From William Shakespeare to Zadie Smith, ‘Writers Revealed’ features over 70 poets, novelists and academics. Each short profile – which provides insight into the writers’ inspirations, struggles, and working practices – is illustrated with a portrait and manuscript.
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£12.99
Fintan O’Toole’s take on Shakespeare challenges traditional approaches to the playwright. The author shows how his works have been made unintelligible by the filtering process of some who have no idea of what Shakespeare truly meant.
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£18.99
An English teacher’s love letter to reading and the many ways literature can make us, and our lives, better.
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£12.99
A charming collection of quotes about cats from our favourite authors, accompanied by artwork in the trademark style of Paul Magrs (author of The Panda, the Cat and the Dreadful Teddy).
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£25.00
Over half a million copies sold Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations… but only one is correct. Can you solve Torquemada’s murder mystery? In 1934, the Observer’s cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written. The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible – through logic and intelligent reading – to sort the pages into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers. Dare you take it on? Please note: this puzzle is extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted.
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£16.99
An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigourous interrogation and beautiful style.
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£10.99
Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard’s department of Comparative Literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran, and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel prizewinners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways the world bleeds into literature. To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience, and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives.
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£16.99
‘A Guest at the Feast’ uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, TóibÃn delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction.
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£20.00
The Writer’s Journey invites you to follow in the footsteps of some of the world’s most famous authors on the travels that inspired their greatest works.
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£18.99
The encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, a good set conveyed a sense of absolute wisdom on its reader. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. But now these huge books gather dust, and sell for almost nothing on eBay, and we derive our information from our phones and computers, apparently for free. What have we lost in this transition? And how did we tell the progress of our lives in the past? This book presents a history and celebration of those who created the most ground-breaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. It tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print.
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£17.99
Ian Fleming’s series of novels based on the adventures of the secret service agent James Bond have thrilled and delighted readers since Casino Royale was published in 1953. And when the film of Dr No was released in 1962, Bond quickly became one of the world’s favourite secret agents. Science and technology have always been central to the plots than make up the world of Bond, and in this book, Kathryn Harkup explores these themes. Naturally, there are 007 chapters, covering the full range of Bond’s exploits, and the arms, technologies, tactics and downfalls of his various foes, from the practicalities of building a volcano-based lair, to whether being covered in gold paint really will kill you, and – if your plan is to take over the world – whether it is better to use bacteria, bombs, or poison.
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£20.00
Most of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic’. In this thrilling history, Emma Smith shows us why.
