Googling Muldoon
Maggot, Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 128pp, £14.99 (hardback) You know the type. He has grown his hair to…
The Transylvanian Trilogy
They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting & They Were Divided, Miklós Bánffy, Arcadia Books, 596, 470 & 336pp,…
A Fallacious Utopian
The Uses of Pessimism: and the Dangers of False Hope, Roger Scruton, Atlantic Books, 240pp, £15.99 (hardcover) I thought…
Is There Life on Mars?
How Snow Falls, Craig Raine, Atlantic Books, 176pp, £14.99 (hardback) Since arriving on the literary scene in the late…
My Modernists
Whatever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici, Yale University Press, 220pp, £18.99 (hardback) In literary journalism vinegar catches more flies…
The Museum of Innocence
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk, Faber and Faber, 533pp, £18.99 I love Orhan Pamuk. I’ve always enjoyed the…
Human Rights and Human Wrongs in a World Gone Mad
Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and Mainstream Publishing, 448pp, £7.99 The Madman…
Sinister Refinement
The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, 470pp, £18.99 ‘The children of the nuclear age,’ wrote Martin Amis in…
Musicwords
Reservoir Voices, Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £8.95 I have in front of me a pile of at least fifteen…
New Collections
Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift, Tall-lighthouse, 64pp, £8 Evidence, Mary Oliver, Bloodaxe, 88pp, £8.95 Shortly before he died, I…
Wedged in a Dream
Planisphere, John Ashbery, Carcanet, 160pp, £12.95 A planisphere is a circular map of the night sky. It has a…
Lebanon’s Faultlines
Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, David Hirst, Faber and Faber, 496pp, £20 (hardback) Spirit…
Fire in the Soul
Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights, Ed. Dinyar Godrej, New Internationalist (supporting Amnesty International), 192pp, £9.99…
Taking the Occasion
Taking the Occasion, Daniel Brown, Ivan R. Dee, 80pp, £13.95 (hardback) Two hundred years on, Wordsworth’s stricture about using…
‘Anything but Gentle’: Henry Moore Revisited
You could wonder about the prudence of presenting Henry Moore to the public for this 24 February to 8…
A Book of Silence
A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland, Granta, 311pp, £8.99 This lively book sets out to restore the importance of…
Looking for Shakespeare
Double Falsehood, Brean Hammond (ed.), Arden Shakespeare, 464pp, £16.99 (paperback) Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro, Faber and…
Quiet Regrets
White Egrets, Derek Walcott, Faber and Faber, 89pp, £12.99 (hardback) ‘Another emblem there!’ W. B. Yeats exclaims in ‘Coole…
The Advantages of Repression
E. M. Forster: A New Life, Wendy Moffat, Bloomsbury, 404pp, £25 Wendy Moffat’s subtitle, A New Life, refers both…
Round and Round
Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, Ferdinand Mount, Simon and Schuster, 438pp, £20 (hardback) I’d…
Political Movements
Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, Nicholas Rowe, I. B. Tauris, 256pp, £30 (hardback) At the…
The Extraordinary Persistence of Faith
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, 304pp, £20 (hardback) Since writing In…
A Talent Too Far
Patrick Procktor: Art and Life, Ian Massey, Unicorn Press, 224pp, £40 (hardback) Patrick Procktor was one of English art’s…
Somnolent Parnassian Slopes
Human Chain, Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, 96pp, £12.99 (hardback) The ecumenical title of Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection is…