Clare Bucknell

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

Studies for His Mind

Sir John Soane’s museum represents the rare survival of a collection that was more like an early modern cabinet of curiosities—flamboyant, overflowing, full of anomalies—than a nineteenth-century institution.

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

The Uphill Battles of the Porter Sisters

Jane and Maria Porter wrote wildly successful historical novels that were cribbed by Walter Scott, but they never found financial security and only now have received their first biography.

Cannibals and Guillotines

Far from a straightforward propagandist, the caricaturist James Gillray preferred pleasing, or irritating, many different kinds of customers.

‘So Whimsical a Head’

A new biography of Charles Lamb, the first in over a century, marks an important staging post on the writer’s road back to respectability.

Wits’ End

Pat Rogers’s new book is salutary because it gives us a modern sense of Alexander Pope, a figure usually portrayed as ultra-traditional.