John Ashbery has been called "the finest poet in English of his generation" ("The Times"). A broad selection of Ashbery's prose writings from 1957 to 2004 is collected here for the first time. Literary reviews and essays, articles on film, and key pi...

A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (T...

In these novellas Adelaida Garcia Morales explores sensitive territory, and her narrators observe it with the adolescent's amoral clarity. "In The South", Adriana's sad enigmatic father presents her with his own suicide on her fifteenth birthday. Sh...

"In The Golden Fleece" (1944), Robert Graves liberates the tale of Jason and the Argonauts from its status as a children's story and reconstitutes it as a fully fledged epic. He fills his Argo with a colourful, quarrelsome and accident-prone crew, wh...

In the decade since the quincentenary of his birth (1994), popular and scholarly understanding of the importance of the life and writings of William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) has risen rapidly, and there is demand for a useful selection of his writings....

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), essayist, poet, humorist, critic, letterwriter and friend, has an enduring literary reputation. His early "Tales from Shakespeare" (1807), written in collaboration with his sister Mary, and "Specimens of English Dramatic Poe...

Between 1909 and his death in 1917, T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) published works that contributed to, and often defined, the major debates of Modernism. A poet, critic and philosopher, Hulme championed new artists and explored new philosophical attitudes,...

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a prolific, versatile and engaging writer. He outlived many of the poets and essayists of his generation whose reputations overshadowed his, but Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats all owed a debt to his advocacy, as d...

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. He was a champion of the French Symbolists. Yeats,...

In Frederic Raphael's essays we meet familiar faces, known names, but the way he reintroduces them to us, with a ruthless clarity which seeks to conceal nothing, make us revalue them. Doubt is what keeps us from the tyranny of bien pensant sentimenta...