Advanced Search

Miranda Seymour

Miranda Seymour is the author, most recently, of In 
Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Byron’s Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace. She is writing a biography of Jean Rhys. (May 2020)

IN THE REVIEW

‘The Awful Force of Inanimate Things’

Anna Kavan: Untitled, date unknown

Machines in the Head: Selected Stories

by Anna Kavan, edited and with a foreword by Victoria Walker
“I can’t keep on all my life writing in the same way,” the extraordinary novelist who called herself Anna Kavan wrote in 1966 to Peter Owen, the publisher whose commitment to her work in her later years helped rescue her from oblivion. Yet from the imprisoning walls and sadomasochistic rituals …

The Magnetic Polymath

Friedrich Georg Weitsch: Alexander von Humboldt, 1806

Selected Writings

by Alexander von Humboldt, edited and with an introduction by Andrea Wulf

Alexander von Humboldt: How the Most Famous Scientist of the Romantic Age Found the Soul of Nature

by Maren Meinhardt
Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769, the same year as Napoleon, to whom he was formally introduced in October 1804, after his return from five years of intrepid exploration in the Spanish Americas, and whose elaborate coronation as emperor he observed in Paris two months later. Fearing that he …