Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people's faith in their institutions and thrown the nation's struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak...

A collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir selected from three decades of the author's contributions to the London review of books. Subjects include Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia (where she lived for four years in the 1980s), the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, and Helen Duncan, Britain's last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher...

"A startling new portrait of George Eliot, the beloved novelist and a rare philosophical mind who explored the complexities of marriage"-- In her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot and published her debut novel. Her life partner, George Lewes, was already married. Their relationship scandalized her contemporaries, yet she grew immeasurably within it. Carlisle shows how, through the immense ambition and dark marriage...

The harshly treated orphan girl Jane Eyre becomes a governess in an mysterious Yorkshire mansion and falls in love with the master of the house.

The author describes growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the group of young women who came together at her home in secret every Thursday to read and discuss great books of Western literature.