Robotic insects, in-growing cutlery, flesh-serving waiters in a zombie cafe... Welcome to the surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek's first collection; a bestiary of hybrids from the techno-crazed future and mythical past; a users' guide to the...

During a Christmas leave in London, Ford Madox Ford attended a party at the French Embassy, "a heavy blond man in a faded uniform" wearied by years of war, recalled to a longing for the life of a writer. The evening marks the beginning of a new phase...

Few novelists have taken films as seriously, or been as closely involved in so many aspects of the film business, as Graham Greene. His experience included producing, performing, script-writing and adaptation. And twenty years before he wrote the scr...

Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes. Or does it? A man stands at a window, looking out. Behind him, a room, bare of people and of furniture. Fragments of conversations drop into his head, conversation...

Stories come in many forms, from nursery rhymes and national anthems to poems and praise songs, and from the stories of science to the rituals of religion. They tell us where we come from, and where we belong; how to live and sometimes how to die. Th...

"...this 'Almanack'", which all ladies should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!" Djuna Barnes wrote her "Ladies Almanack" for fun,...

Parade's End is the title Ford Madox Ford gave to his greatest work, the four Tietjens novels which, in Graham Greene's words, tell "the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned...

This volume brings together two historical novels based upon the Bible. "King Jesus" is a daring rewriting of the Gospels in the light of Graves's speculations in history and mythology. His Jesus is a charismatic religious reformer dedicated to the e...

She is eighty. Facing death, she considers her experiments with narrative, and with the narrative of her life. What is the purpose of the narrative she is creating here, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? At the centre of...

John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, a...