Faber Faber: 1353 books

Bronowski was fascinated by William Blake for much of his life. His first book about him, A Man Without a Mask, was published in 1944. In 1958 his famous Penguin selection of Blake's poems and letters was published. As further testimony to Bronowski's enthusiasm it should be noted that the final plate...

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of Scrutiny, which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world. The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from Scrutiny, including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot,...

As a boy in 1934 Paul Vaughan unwittingly became part of a social trend - a great mass migration to the outskirts of London - as his family moved from Brixton to booming New Malden, where their new semi was a mere stroll away from countryside. This was Suburbia, and its outlook was not entirely promising....

The Wind in the Willows needs no introduction - children have enjoyed the exploits of its characters for generations. Few would guess that its author, Kenneth Grahame, was a tortured soul. Marriage to the predatory Elspeth Thomson, when both seemed destined for the single life, was a shared fantasy...

A Classical Education was first published in 1985. It followed immediately after Still Life and is again autobiographical though of a somewhat more macabre hue. At the centre is a murder committed by a school friend of Richard Cobb's. 'What gives A Classical Education its fascination is the author's...

A wonderful anthology of poems to set fire to the imagination. We only have to 'remember, remember the 5th of November' to see a dark night filled with fireworks and bonfires. In their many different ways - through their sounds, rhythms, stories, surprises and jokes - these poems will set the fireworks...

The Haunted Study, a rare example of a work of literary history that is genuinely interdisciplinary, explores how the leading novelists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods came to develop so many of the attitudes that are now generally accepted as characteristically modern. The writing...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most...

'Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.'John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet...

'A brilliant and scholarly biography of an extraordinary figure.' Lord Blake, Country Life'A fresh, engaging, conscientious account of one of the great Victorians.' Michael Foot, London Review of Books'A thorough and convincing account of 'the sage''. Peter Ackroyd, Times Thomas Carlyle was...

Richard III has the most controversial reputation of any English king. If he was the murderer of his two nephews and (as many contemporaries thought) the poisoner of his own wife, he has a place among the foremost villains of history. If however his only real crime was to have been on the losing side,...

Aickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term) are constructed immaculately, the neuroses of his characters painted in subtle shades. He builds dread by the steady accrual of realistic detail, until the reader realises that the protagonist is heading towards their doom as if in a dream. The...

The description 'definitive' is too easily used, but Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov merits it unhesitatingly. To quote no less an authority than Michael Frayn: 'With question the definitive biography of Chekhov, and likely to remain so for a very long time to come. Donald Rayfield starts...

Horace Walpole, famous for his novel The Castle of Otranto and his gothick castle-villa, Strawberry Hill, has been oddly shielded by his previous admirers. The most famous of these was W. S. Lewis, a rich American scholar, who collected virtually all of Walpole's surviving letters and papers and edited...