Though a talented poet, Rebecca Watts remains best known for her essay “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, published in the poetry journal PN Review in 2018. It was ironic that this piece attracted much ...

“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman once said. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work”, Which means it’s a wonder that any ...

If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient Mesopotamia ought to be famous for its astonishing legacy of poetry and prose. For ...

The life of Jeremy Catto, a tutor in medieval history at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, opens a window onto a lost world. In the pressure cooker of modern uni­versity ...

Oba Electroplating Factory is the fourth instalment of Drawn and Quarterly’s seven-volume Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge series. It is a collection of seven short pieces published in 1973–4, ...

Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio comes a decade after his version of the Inferno. That was set in the University of Essex; this is set on Mersea Island, which makes one wonder: where will his ...

Angel Kelly is an innocent abroad. To be specific, he is on a slaver bound for Brazil at the close of the eighteenth century, thinking to put his inheritance to fine use by founding a utopian ...

424pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95). Charles S. Singleton’s version of The Divine Comedy (first published in six volumes between 1970 and 1975, and now reissued by Princeton University ...