‘Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days’

Sherlock Holmes: the quintessential British hero and the world's most...

'Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must'

What is the true meaning of...

‘Wealth and beggary, virtue and vice, repletion and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding together’

Could...

‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete...

‘To myself alone could I look’

Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are heroines who depend upon no one but themselves. In the face of...

A high-pitched laugh echoes in an empty church. Servants discover their master dead in his bed, the only sign of disturbance an...

How do you remember the summers of your childhood?

For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an...

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a...

Enjoy Helen Simpson's sharply funny, humane take on the everyday joys and struggles of motherhood in this perfect Mother's Day...

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an...

Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with...

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads.

How to be a good...

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the...

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary...

What’s the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball....

What do we do when we find ourselves trapped by our own thoughts or behaviour? Drawing on his twenty-five years' experience as a...

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.
How do...

Can we ever be wholly free? In this book of breathtaking imaginary leaps that conjure dystopias and magical islands, Margaret...

Have you ever dreamt you were naked on stage, or woken having failed an exam? In these fascinating, pioneering essays, Sigmund...