Key Penmanship Indicators (KPIs) VI
This is a description by Anthony Burgess of the reader's reaction to Mervyn Peake's writing in the intricately imaginative Gormenghast...
A real craving of nature
Branwell Bronte, the sister-eclipsed son in a family of six, caused them and his father great heartache through alcoholism and...
The history of books
An idea so intrinsic to reading books, particularly those you love and remember, that I had never consciously thought of...
Book as mirror I
A great riposte, of course, and true to a large extent. Having dismissed a book, it sometimes happens that I...
How to read a book in a language you don’t know (I)
When Luiz went to Brazil recently, I gave him a copy of a Caroline story for his two great-nieces. Most...
A gallery of readers
To celebrate World Book Day, please visit this image gallery by the photographer Steve McCurry, a beautiful...
Worse than cocaine
If you were traversing the Soviet Union it was better to be caught with a kilo of cocaine than a...
Reading as travel
The Rat is a street-savvy kid in a barely known children's book by the author of the infinitely famous
The measure of a philistine
Zafón's bibliophile characters are often as opinionated as they are erudite, and have no truck with people who barely read. ...
Immortality by reading
This wonderful quotation was published in El Pais in the days following Umberto Eco’s passing. Wishing you 5,000 years of reading-endowed...
A capacious book thief
Steinbeck and Robert Capa spent a month in the Soviet Union. It took some time for Steinbeck to cotton on...
The illuminated space of the poem
Reading can extend life, as Umberto Eco put it: a reader can live 5000 years as opposed to the three...
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