Gardens feature in every genre of Roman literature, from obscene epigrams to dry agricultural treatises, though often in the background or on the margins – as the setting for Cicero’s philosophical ...

In the opening and title poem of his ninth collection, Ian Duhig recalls finding “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, at which point another “lit … in a thought bubble” above his “dull bulb of ...

This follow-up to Bookworm (2018), Lucy Mangan’s memoir about the books she read in childhood, chronicles some of the reading that has provided entertainment and solace in her adult life, particularly ...

The Danish author Solvej Balle came to fame with According to the Law (1993; 1996 in English): four linked stories about “the raw isolation of humankind”. She then retreated to an isolation of her own ...

640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...

The chaos agents who drive Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller belong to two of the most easily overlooked demographics: an old woman and a child. The yawning age gap between the eighty-one-year-old ...

Caroline Moorehead salutes the energetic brilliance of the singer Josephine Baker and Aaron Peck discusses the past, present and future of the avant garde Margaret Drabble explores how Dickens drew on ...

“Few passions are constant, but many are sincere”. The maxim is by the Marquis de Vauvenargues, one-time proprietor of the Provençal chateau where Pablo Picasso and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, ...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170 after seven years of bitter quarrel with his old friend Henry II, is one of the most well-known and well-documented figures ...

Paul Celan, originally from Czernowitz in Romania (now in Ukraine), was a Holocaust survivor and arguably the greatest postwar German-language poet. He met the French aristocrat, artist and printmaker ...