The literary fl?neur wanders amongst places and objects, images, film and ideas: a series of short, discursive essays that are the more brilliant for being unassuming.
Having escaped the massacre at Katyn, Czapski was interned and lived to write these essays on some of those who were murdered, as well as pieces on Blok, Soutine, and others. He was the mode... read more
A sequence of essays about the Treaty that addressed the new Turkish state and the Middle East. At Versailles, before the rise of Ataturk, the West thought such matters had less claim on the... read more
Conversational, elegant and subtle essays on art, literature, urban life in war-time Shanghai and Hong Kong by the admired Chinese-born American novelist, screenwriter and cultural critic. F... read more
Linnaeus riding through Lapland; frost fairs on the Thames; courtship in the snow in Japan; Tove Jansson on her childhood; snippets of Beth Chatto. An anthology of wintry delights.
The great Russian poet became a master of the English language in his long American exile: these essays evoke his youth in post-WW2 Leningrad with memorable portraits of his parents, in whom... read more
Those familiar with the exquisite vagaries that have come from the pen of this author (also known as Jack Robinson and Jennie Walker) will rejoice at these 99 paragraphs observing and enjoyi... read more
Iridescent, funny, subversive, endlessly surprising, sharp as a wind cutting in from the North Sea: many will know Barker's startlingly good writing from her only novel O Caledonia. Here are... read more
Quietism perhaps, rather than the silence of things not being talked about: the art of listening, of stilling the interior babble. By the writer, painter and traveller who set up the Travel ... read more