Alan Judd

J eremy Lewis, biographer, critic and former publisher, has perpetrated a third enjoyable volume of memoirs, Grub Street Irregular (HarperCollins, £20). He writes so well, with......

Jonathan Mirsky

M y Father’s Roses by Nancy Kohner (Hodder, £18.99) recalls the bourgeois, non-observant Jewish world of central Europe from which Ms Kohner’s father, an émigré to England, was......

D. J. Taylor

T he tiny independent firm of London Books, founded last year, specialises in reprints of hard-boiled thrillers from the interwar years. Two I particularly enjoyed were James......

P. J. Kavanagh

I n the winter of 1896, on a barrow in Charing Cross Road, a mid-17th-century manuscript found by a scholar was eventually proved to be by Thomas Traherne. This was Centuries of......

Sebastian Smee

I was excited to see the publication this year of Peter Schjeldahl’s Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, £18.95). Schjeldahl’s is not typical New......

Byron Rogers

T he Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales , (University of Wales Press, £65) for its scholarship, also for its sense of proportion, as in comments such as this on Roy Jenkins,......