Literature

Poet Laureate from 1850, writes Joanna Richardson, Tennyson became an acknowledged interpreter of Victorian morals and politics.

Joanna Richardson describes how the diarists of the early nineteenth century wrote some highly distinctive memoirs of politics and Court life.

During the eighteenth century female authors became increasingly numerous and industrious; while as readers, writes Robert Halsband, thanks to the spread of the new circulating libraries, women began to form ‘a significant sector’ of the literary public.

Joanna Richardson describes the life and work of the French father of science fiction.

In his memoirs Chateaubriand denounces Napoleon. But, asks Douglas Hilt, is it not a figure of grandeur and vision that emerges?

For the 18th-century tourist, there was a strange beauty in rugged industrial landscapes, which moved them to quote poetry and dash off pages of vivid descriptive prose.

I.F. Clarke offers a study of the “pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war” as foreseen by imaginative writers and artists.

From Piketty’s trumpet-blast to the great deeds of medieval saints, ten leading historians tell us about their best reads from 2014.

The late 17th century saw the arrival of a new way of buying and selling books. Amy Bowles explores the impact of the book auction on those with a commercial and scholarly interest in the printed word.

During the opening years of the twentieth century, writes I.F. Clarke, many fantastic forecasts of the coming World War aroused widespread interest and alarm.