Troppo Sottile

Venice has traded flinty commercial acumen and world-weary merchant princes for an ennui worthy of M. John Harrison's science fiction; her profession has now become the art of insubstantiality. For centuries authors have tried and failed to capture her. Steve Donoghue surveys the glorious wreckage.

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Abandonment, Richness, Surprise

Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated: Virginia Woolf's literary essays challenge us to rethink, not just our experience of reading, but our expectations of criticism itself.

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Shore to Shore

For two generations, the great American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson has been instructing and delighting his readers - and inspiring some of them to become critics themselves.

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Byronic Interludes

The larger-than-life exploits of Lord Byron drew an erratic and daunting trajectory through the lives of those nearest him. A trilogy of novels attempts to go where so many biographies have gone before.

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“My Job Is to Be King"

When the long reign of Victoria ended, her son took the throne with a bonhomie the country hadn't seen in a century. The new king ate and entertained prodigiously - and mediated prodigiously as "the uncle of Europe." A Year with the Windsors looks at Edward VII.

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History Without the Moon

Her reign was epic in length and social impact, but it very nearly didn't happen at all. She ruled through two generations of her people, and she left the British monarchy very different from how she found it. She is Queen Victoria, and our Year with the Windsors starts as it must: with her.

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