Explores what Proust had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive. This book also contains the author's own commentary on Proust.

This history of reading goes from the earliest examples of the clay tablets and cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to today's digital revolution. It argues that it is the demands of the reader, acting alongside the will of the writer, that is the evolutionary motor of literary genres.

The author is the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill , and who once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only thing in her apartment that she had not read at least twice. This title recounts her lifelong obsession with books.

The theatre for which Shakespeare wrote and acted was a cut-throat commercial entertainment industry. Yet his plays were also intensely alert to the social and political realities of their times.

Combining literary analysis, biography and history, this is a cultural portrait of the first half of the 20th century. As well as discussing Pound's poetry and his sources, it includes a biography of Pound and a series of essays on the parallel developments of Eliot, Joyce, Lewis and Williams.