For People Who Devour Books

Book Reviews by subject:
Literary biography & Poetry & Biography

December 2023 Issue

Rowan Williams

The Poet’s Burden

On Czesław Miłosz: Visions from the Other Europe

By Eva Hoffman

April 2021 Issue

Joanna Kavenna

She Hated Poetry Readings

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew

By Julia Copus

December 2020 Issue

Nigel Andrew

A Ventriloquist’s Love Song

Being Betjeman(n)

By Jonathan Smith

April 1998 Issue

Nicholas Murray

Rare Case of a Poet who Doubted His Own Genius

A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold

By Ian Hamilton

December 1999 Issue

Jeremy Lewis

Case History of a Literary Groupie

Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism

By David Lemming

April 2017 Issue

Donald Rayfield

Witness to a Century

Miłosz: A Biography

By Andrzej Franaszek (Edited & translated by Aleksandra & Michael Parker)

November 1993 Issue

Sylvia Clayton

Blake’s Progress

Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law

By E P Thompson

February 2017 Issue

Robert Crawford

Voice from the Asylum

The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound

By Daniel Swift

July 1986 Issue

Ray Ockenden

Rilke the Romantic

A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke

By Donald Prater

Letters, Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke

By Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak & Konstantin Azadorsky (eds)

June 1985 Issue

Michael Hamburger

Artistic Monomania

Rilke: A Life

By Wolfgang Leppmann (Translated by Russell M Stockman)

February 2015 Issue

Seamus Perry

Possum Emerges

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land

By Robert Crawford

The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 5, 1930–1931

By Valerie Eliot & John Haffenden (edd)

September 2014 Issue

Matthew Sperling

Good, Bad & Ugly

Ezra Pound: Poet – A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Volume II, The Epic Years 1921–1939

By A David Moody

September 2010 Issue

John Stubbs

Coy Poet

Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon

By Nigel Smith

December 2008 Issue

Allan Massie

A Man For A’ That

The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography

By Robert Crawford

October 2007 Issue

Peter McDonald

Red-Headed Rebel

Ezra Pound: Poet I – The Young Genius, 1885–1920

By A David Moody

August 2006 Issue

Peter Washington

Kierkegaard & Chocolate

The Man Who Went into the West

By Byron Rogers

April 2006 Issue

Andro Linklater

Orkney’s Laureate

The Life of George Mackay Brown: Through the Eye of a Needle

By Maggie Fergusson

June 2005 Issue

William Palmer

Manunkind

E E Cummings: A Biography

By Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

March 2014 Issue

Jeremy Noel-Tod

Modern Family

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

By Linda Leavell

October 2013 Issue

Duncan Wu

No Scribbling Rivalry

William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’

By Lucy Newlyn