One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and...

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. In Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's literary history, we watch T. S. Eliot and his working-class students revise...

"To love is to act" – "Aimer, c'est agir".  These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life's philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people – especially the poor and wretched – drove him not only to wri...

What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions – bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life – animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard...

Francis Spufford's welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relat...

Since World War II, the story of the trauma hero – the noble white man psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence – has become omnipresent in America's narratives of war, an imaginary solution to the contradictions of American political h...

The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells...

Not for sale in Estonia! Honore de Balzac's "Treatise on Modern Stimulants" is a meditation on five stimulants – tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco – by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an e...

This richly illustrated book explores the huge creative endeavour behind Tolkien's enduring popularity. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 images of his manuscripts, drawings, maps and letters, the book traces the creative process behind his most fam...

This volume is an excellent introduction to the world of J. R. R. Tolkien. Recounting in images and words the story of his early years and life as a scholar and family man, the book also illustrates some of the primary items associated with "The Hobb...