How does an Oxford academic follow up a prize-winning trade book, a newly researched biography of Geoffrey Chaucer? And, moreover, in lockdown, when archives and libraries are largely inaccessible? Marion Turner, the newly elected J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford, has avoided ‘second-book syndrome’ with a breathtakingly simple idea: a biography of Chaucer’s most famous character, Dame Alison (or Alice), weaver... read more

In October 2022, the United States Department of Commerce implemented with little warning a set of export control regulations effectively outlawing the export of US semiconductor technology to China. Given China’s reliance on non-Chinese tools, software and facilities in the manufacture of microchips – the silicon semiconductors upon which all information technologies rely – this was potentially a major blow to China’s ambition... read more

One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ‘the driving necessity – the crying need?’ Ambitious, curious, greedy for experience, she became a formidable innovator, reading and borrowing from other authors, adapting techniques from avant-garde painting, music and new media, and trying all the time to make it new. It helped that she was no snob... read more

What a delectable banquet of a book this is. Diane Purkiss examines how food has created and underpinned the history of the English nation by detailing the slow work of transforming raw ingredients into sustenance. Purkiss divides her book into chapters devoted to broad categories (such as apples, pigs, loaves, fishes, foraging and tinned foods), interspersing these with entertaining and discursive essays on breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. If occasionally the ... read more

God does not approve of street lighting, observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That wasn’t an oblique aphorism: it was simple biblical exposition. The God of Genesis is famously keen on maintaining boundaries between domains. There is supposed to be light (‘Let there be light’) and darkness (‘He separated the light from the darkness’ and called ‘the light “day”, and the darkness... read more

At the beginning of The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy seems to have taken a turn for the literal. For nearly six decades, McCarthy’s great twin themes have been the brutality underpinning the American myth of the West and the human longing for salvation in an apparently godless world. Here, then, is the protagonist of his new novel, a professional salvage diver by the name of Robert Western... read more