Four hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 September 1543, three Portuguese merchants travelling on a Chinese junk were blown by a storm onto the south-western tip of Japan. So at last was discovered to the West that fabled country which Marco Polo repo...

The worries many people have about the Church of England and its future are not confined to the matters most hotly debated in Synod. C. H. Sisson does not pretend to have answers. What he does, in pieces which range over more than four decades, is to...

Donald Davie is a poet-critic: his admirable essays are free of jargon, full of the clarity and insight of a major practitioner of the poetic art. His writing is in every sense refreshing: a pleasure to read and an inspiration to re-read the writers...

Three traditions are represented in this anthology: a Chartist and radical literature, a Parnassian strand, and a deliberately local manner, often steeped in dialect. This is a literature poised between speech and print, between the anonymous street...

Treatise on the "Arte of Limning" is one of the most important documents in the history of English art. Published in paperback for the first time, this edition provides a transcript of the original manuscript copy facing a modernised version, extensi...

When he was twenty, C. H. Sisson found himself in Hitler's Germany, and a year later in Paris. He was brought face-to-face with a realty of politics largely ignored by English radicals of the 1930s. He returned home at once more European and more viv...

"In Two Minds" advances a single argument: that reading and writing are collaborative ventures with past and future. Tradition is a living resource. Sisson considers literary vocation, the act of reading, the practice of real criticism and the comed...