When war breaks out, a swarm of other industries quickly surrounds the battlefield; aid agencies, NGOs, international media corporations, mercenaries and private investors... all descend on the conflict like a second wave of invaders. Never was this...

Short story writers often say that, for maximum dramatic effect, you should arrive fashionably late to a scene. After years of living in the literary wilderness, it seems the short story's own moment has finally arrived. The last twelve months have m...

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) moved among the ghosts of the Great War every day of his long life, having survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme. His classic prose memoir, "Undertones of War", and his early edition of Wilfred Owen's poems were just...

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will div...

This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or emigres displaced from their cultural and geographical origins. The subjects include poet John Rety (...

Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Stri...

"Sometimes I'm tempted to throw away all I've written so far and start again, write quite a different kind of book, in the first person perhaps. Or write it in the third person but like a novel, with more freedom to go where a critical study could no...

John Ashbery is known as America's foremost poet, but his prose writing and his engagement with prose writers – through translations, essays and criticism – have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. This book, the...

Gottfried Benn ranks among the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. His early work, with its shockingly graphic depictions of human suffering and degradation, was associated with the Expressionist movement; the overriding theme of...

In "Parallax" Sinead Morrissey documents what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia") are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a...