Philip Hoare’s books include Wilde’s Last Stand, England’s Lost Eden, and Spike Island. Leviathan or, The Whale won the Samuel Johnson Prize for 2009, and The Sea Inside was published in 2013. He is professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton, and co-curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read. His website is www.philiphoare.co.uk, and he is on Twitter @philipwhale.
Peter Ackroyd's gay history spans from the Romans to the present day.
Chief Engineer: the Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge tells the story of the father and son responsible for the epic project.
Three new “swimoirs” plumb the depths of the question.
Animals are our fellow travellers on this earth. It's time we heard what they have to say.
Laing’s book uses her own loneliness to consider a group of 20th-century figures who expressed their alienation through art.
Bowie became a conduit for a lost generation, reaching those who the 1960s had left behind.
Late at night, Herman Melville “turned flukes” down Oxford Street as if he were being followed by a great whale, and thought he saw “blubber rooms” in the butcheries of the Fleet Market.
Two new books by Alexandra Harris and Christine L Corton show how weather - and pollution - have powered the English imagination.
Trans challenges us all, no matter what our gender.
Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus: a Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness does for the creature what H is for Hawk did for raptors.
The Brexit Plague