First published in 1966, Robert Bernard Martin's The Accents of Persuasion is a consummate critical study of Charlotte Brontë's four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette ...

If critics often disagree among themselves over the merits of a given work, this is nothing compared to the wider argument about what the critic's role should be - Objective ...

Volume 4 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, which brings the poet, critic, editor and publisher into his forties, documents a period of anxious and fast-moving professional recovery and ...

'This valedictory volume is the quintessence of [Alan] Ross, a deft and deceptively airy set of literary wanderings through a part of the Mediterranean - the islands of the south-western coast ...

During the years when George IV ruled the United Kingdom, first as Prince Regent then as King, his extravagant tastes served to characterize the times - the Regency period being identified ...

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured ...

Ian Hamilton's last book, published posthumously in 2002, is a typically brilliant revisiting of the concept of Samuel Johnson's classic Lives of the English Poets, wherein Hamilton considers ...

The Secret Life of Poems

is a primer which offers a poem - or on occasion an excerpt - with succeeding commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order ...

What makes a novel a novel? How does the language used in a novel create a world different from that of drama or poetry?  What kinds of truth can be ...

In The Faber Book of French Cinema, Charles Drazin explores the rich film culture and history of the country that first established the cinema as the most important mass medium ...

The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and ...

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured ...

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured ...

John Cowper Powys could never be straightforward or orthodox but here he sets off with a useful purpose:

‘The aim of this book,’ he declares, ‘is to narrow down a ...

With typically disarming modesty, the author, Professor Reginald Christian, writes in his preface, 'This is a book about a book, and as such it is doubtful it would meet with ...

This great modernist masterpiece, which for many readers seems so intimidating, is one of the great books that can teach us how to live better lives.

Declan Kiberd shows that ...

The idea for this book - a new selection of her poems with notes - grew out of Wendy Cope’s experience of meeting her audience, when reading her poems in schools ...

The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and ...

Volume One of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot in 1988, covered the period from Eliot’s childhood in St Louis, Missouri, to the end of ...

Volume One of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot in 1988, covered the period from Eliot’s childhood in St Louis, Missouri, to the end of ...