"Environment at the Crossroads", the theme of the 2009 Gulbenkian Conference, addresses the most urgent crisis confronting the world today, in its four essential aspects: How deeply is the current economic malaise rooted in failing systems? Do we hav...

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod is best known for two poems, the "Theogony" and the "Works and Days". The "Theogony" gives an account of the creation of the universe andthe war between the Titans and Olympians, while "Works and Days" offers plain-speak...

"Prose Occasions" gathers over half a century's critical writing by the poet Thomas Kinsella. It makes available for the first time in a single volume key works including "The Divided Mind", his influential discussion of Anglo-Irish poetry, writings...

From the perspective of the early 1940s, Robert Graves and his co-author of "The Long Weekend", the journalist and historian Alan Hodge surveyed the darkening interwar years from 1918 to 1939 with wit, insight and a passionate curiosity about the idi...

Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-c...

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Personal Terms", was greeted in the TLS as "a small masterpiece". With the publication of "Cuts and Bruises", the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. C...

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...

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) has long been recognised as one of Britain's greatest film directors. His studies of national life, and particularly his three war time films "Listen to Britain", "Fires Were Started", and "A Diary for Timothy", invaluab...

In "Letters of Introduction" Kevin Jackson invents a new genre, the Alphabet Essay, providing a playful A to Z of cultural heroes and legends, from William Blake to Marguerite Yourcenar, from Albion to Zen. Here, Kevin Jackson promises, we will enco...

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism – American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of "Modernism in...