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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Eliot After The Waste Land (Eliot Biographies, 2)
by Robert Crawford, Jonathan Cape £25/Farrar, Straus & Giroux $35
After a six-year wait, Robert Crawford follows up Young Eliot (2016) with his second (and final) volume on the life of TS Eliot in time for the centenary of “The Waste Land”. Here, he explores Eliot’s marriage and religious life and draws on the 1,131 letters written to American friend Emily Hale that were only released from embargo in 2020 to probe the poet’s later years with tact and empathy.
All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia
by Simon Garfield, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99/William Morrow $29.99 February 28, 2023
Simon Garfield, author of quirky histories on everything from fonts to maps, surveys the publishing phenomenon that is the encyclopedia. Tracing its origins from Ancient Greece right up to its modern incarnation in Wikipedia, his handsome book offers an erudite and amusing exploration of the human quest for knowledge.
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem
by Matthew Hollis, Faber £20/W. W. Norton & Company $30.49, December 20, 2022
In the 100 years since TS Eliot penned his famous poem, it has taken on a life of its own. So it’s fitting, perhaps, that Matthew Hollis treats Eliot’s work to its own biography. This richly analytical book locates the poem’s genesis in the aftermath of the first world war and the “nightmare agony” of Eliot’s disastrous marriage.
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
by Keiron Pim, Granta £25/$35
“I paint the portrait of the age,” Joseph Roth once claimed. Certainly, his work as a journalist from 1917-1939, dissecting central and eastern Europe in more than a thousand essays and anticipating the collapse of democracy on the continent as well as 19 novels provides an exceptional anatomy of a tumultuous period of history. Keiron Pim’s biography goes some way to introducing the great Austro-Hungarian writer to a new age.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell, Faber £16.99/Farrar, Straus & Giroux $30
Katherine Rundell, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, has produced a remarkable life of John Donne, the great poet of love, sex and death. Winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize, her biography of the man who was at once soldier, poet, prisoner and priest is sensitive and witty, capturing the essence of a tricky subject.
Books of the Year 2022
All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:
Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: Critics’ choice
The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of the World in 99 Obsessions
by Kate Summerscale, Profile £16.99/Penguin Random House $20
This neat compendium from the prizewinning author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher charts a broad and intriguing range of fears and madness. Although these phobias and manias are alphabetised, Kate Summerscale suggests groupings (textures, animals, communal crazes) that — accompanied by a lightly erudite introduction — illuminate some of the darker corners of our collective psyche.
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
by Irene Vallejo, translated by Charlotte Whittle, Hodder & Stoughton £25/Knopf $35
Described as “a masterpiece” by Mario Vargas Llosa when it was first published in Spain in 2019, this bestselling phenomenon is now available in English. In it, Irene Vallejo recounts the birth of literary culture in the ancient world while interweaving dynamic, thrilling tales that underscore and celebrate the power of words to change the world.
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
by Andrea Wulf, John Murray £25/Knopf $35
Between 1794-1806, the cream of Germany’s intelligentsia descended on the tiny university town of Jena. There, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mingled with philosophers Friedrich Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the scientist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the playwright Friedrich Schiller during the first flush of Romanticism. Andrea Wulf’s wonderful book brings to life the “Jena set” and a golden age of German culture.
Tell us what you think
What are your favourites from this list — and what books have we missed? Tell us in the comments below
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