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Roger Luckhurst of Birkbeck talks to me about the enduring appeal of Dracula and I ask him: “It’s all about sex, isn’t it?”

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography of the first three decades of Dickens’ life is published by Harvard University Press next month. It’s a terrifically readable, refreshing look at his life story which rescues Dickens from a sense of inevitability, that the only fate reserved for him was to become the greatest novelist of his day. From the [...]

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What is the OED and who is it for? from George Miller on Vimeo. In this short film, John Simpson, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains what the aim of the dictionary is and who it is for. As you’ll hear, the potential audience for the dictionary has massively increased since it went online.

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I interviewed Sarah Bakewell last month about her biography of Montaigne for the new Interview of the Month slot on the Blackwell Online website (that interview will be available there very soon). Visiting her website recently I saw her post about Irmgard Keun, a writer I had never heard of. It turned out that Sarah [...]

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Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London’s Evening Standard as “an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture.” The world, however, was unprepared for such hilarity and so he decided to give it up. He is the author of Comedy [...]

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Our third guest reviewer of this year’s publishing highlights is Cambridge-based historian of medicine, Louise Foxcroft. Louise won the Longman/History Today Prize in 2009 for her book Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause. You can hear a podcast in which she discusses the book here. And here are Louise’s favourite books [...]

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Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, most recently, the author of How to Read a Word, a book that aims to [...]

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I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man’s death a century ago on 20 November 1910. The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, but in the meantime, here is Rosamund reading a short extract from the book itself, in [...]

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst introduces a Victorian classic, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, a work of journalism he has called “the greatest Victorian novel never written”. Interviewed in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, he explains why this book is still well worth reading today.

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Maria McCann’s first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published  in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, called it “taut and compelling” and the Independent a “tour de force”. It is set in [...]

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