A long chapter in the history of bookselling belatedly closed last month – a chapter that opened in 1792. That was when a London couple, Anna and Henry Walton Smith, set up as news vendors in Mayfair.

322pp. Picador. Paperback, £10.99. Both Newby’s book and From Scenes Like These are set in the 1950s, and we can see that both novels, from different angles, are trying to come to terms with an old, ...

To return or not to return? That is the question that has defined the long-running debate around the sculptures made almost 2,500 years ago to adorn the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens. They tend ...

Few writers get you closer to the live experience of looking at art than T. J. Clark. As his eye roams across Henri Matisse’s portrait “Woman with a Hat” (1905), he asks the kinds of questions that we ...

Guadalupe Nettel’s new collection of short stories, The Accidentals, beautifully translated by Rosalind Harvey, begins with an epigraph from Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as ...

In autumn 1988, I travelled by ferry from Helsinki to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia – a four-hour crossing over the Gulf of Finland. The reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had ...

In Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte prises open and peers into the ugliest parts of the modern psyche. Following the author’s debut novel, Private Citizens (2016), this collection of short stories is ...

“From my youth onwards”, wrote the Viennese Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in 1950, “I have found in Jesus my great brother.” Buber was one of many Jewish and Christian thinkers who reflected on ...

Nikko is a small mountain town two hours north of Tokyo, where towering cedars erupt from scraggly ravines and a green-blue river gallops beneath a 300-year-old lacquered bridge. High above the town, ...

There are approximately 10,000 medieval churches in Britain, and Andrew Ziminski, a stonemason and restorer, has visited more than half of them. Churches of shorter pedigree are not wholly absent in ...

256pp. And Other Stories. Paperback, £14.99. Morgan Talty Charles, the narrator of Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, does not know when exactly his daughter, Elizabeth, was born. For days, he sat ...