Literature

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some controversy.

Poets across the ages have sought help with their writing – but AI bears no comparison with the divine.

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

The greatest early modern authority on Ottoman Greece was Martin Cruisius – a man who had never left Germany.

On the 250th anniversary of her birth, Jane Austen still has lessons for readers of history.

Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World by Edith Hall sees the signs of environmental collapse amid the adventures of Achilles.

Can Vietdamned: How the World’s Greatest Minds Put America on Trial by Clive Webb rescue Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s activism from irrelevance?

The monks of Peterborough told strange tales of the Wild Hunt. Were they ghostly apparitions or wishful thinking?

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing brings folklore’s most famous double act out of the shadowy realm of legend.