Do rave reviews on book covers count as literary criticism?
A literary puff is the promotional blurb that appears on book jackets and publishers’ press releases. Dr Ross Wilson discusses…
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Louise O’Neill: “I just love teenage girls. There’s something about that age that is so painful and so raw”
The author of Only Ever Yours tells June Eric-Udorie why she’s tackled the issue of consent in her new novel.
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Seven Brief Lessons on Physics makes physics sound like Romantic poetry
With his new book of popular science, Carlo Rovelli has struck gold.
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The House by the Lake is a history of Germany told in a single house
History, which we learn about as a series of ideological abstractions, is lived concretely – in ordinary houses.
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Windows on the soul: AS Byatt on Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain
Britain’s portraits tell stories of subversion and obsession in a book which reveals something new on every page.
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The kindness of strangers: the extreme end of altruism
When Larissa MacFarquhar told people she was working on a book about extreme altruists, she was asked the same, telling…
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What lies beneath: how Europe succumbed to toxic ideology and violence
A review of Ian Kershaw and Heinrich August Winkler’s accounts of Europe’s “age of catastrophe”, 1914-49.
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She’s leaving home: the women who left North Korea
There is something unsettling about the western media’s fascination with North Korea, as these two books reveal.
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