'Dazzling... Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct...as innate to us as flying is to geese... Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigati...
After The Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz was exiled for many years from his home country of Poland. In Native Realm, he evokes that homeland and his years away from it; how it nurtured him and ho...
Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own, and when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. E...
The sixteen essays gathered here represent the last pieces written by Susan Sontag in the years before her death in 2004. Reflecting on literature, photography and art, post-9/11 America and politi...
In The Best Minds of My Generation Ginsberg gives us the convoluted origin story of the 'Beat' idea. Amongst anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs and other figures for the first time, Ginsberg e...
The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, bestselling author of Swing Time and White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essaysWITH NEW MATERIAL ADDED - an extra es...
Don't know if it's, like, okay to say 'like'?Are your apostrophe's in the wrong place?Should it be 'past' or 'passed'?Want to make fewer not less grammatical mistakes?...
'The right book has a neverendingness, and so does the right bookshop.'This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scraw...
A new edition of the collection of 10 letters by the Bohemian poet Rilke, advising a young poet on writing, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself. Hugely influential, this is Lady Gaga's f...
Nothing enflames the language gripers like a misplaced disinterested, an illogical irregardless, a hideous operationalisation. To a purist these are 'howlers' and 'non-words', fit only for scorn. B...