Literature

The Anglo-Saxons knew that life – and land – is precarious, which makes its gifts precious.

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff refutes the claim by Virginia Woolf, that the women of Tudor England left only empty bookshelves.

Did the Greeks really trick their way into Troy inside a gigantic wooden horse?

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature by Abigail Williams argues that misunderstanding popular literature was a sign of its success.

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was an unexpected bestseller, whose success rose and fell with its author.

When it arrived on the Victorian stage, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had a cast of new characters and a new social order.

Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox is a masterly survey of the Iliad, its majesty, its pathos and its unparalleled progression from wrath to pity.

Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America by Nick Witham explores the industry of popular history from Daniel Boorstin to Howard Zinn.

The anti-Russian poetry of Frances Browne, the ‘Blind Poetess of Ulster’.

Remembered as Adam’s first wife, a child-killing demon and a feminist hero, who was Lilith?