In 1790, while serving in the Piedmontese army, the French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre was arrested for duelling and sentenced to 42 days imprisonment in his own lodgings. The result was the singular little masterpiece ...

Fifteen years ago, the London Review of Books took the momentous – some said foolish – decision to open an independent bookshop. In just a few short weeks, working according to a brief from the LRB’s chief designer ...

I'm sure most of you have binge-watched back-to-back episodes of Lewis, Suits, The Crown and Designated Survivor. But what are your favourite binge reads? I've just finished reading all five (so far) of Mick Herron's ...

As a book-loving naturalist, I find it hard to leave the house without, in addition to hand lens, binoculars and field microscope, at least half a dozen well-thumbed field guides. They'll vary a bit depending on where ...

I'm tempted to describe moths as the Cinderellas of the natural world, although unlike Cinderella they mainly come out at night. Often neglected, or dismissed as pests, they have always been somewhat in the shadow of ...

The great Scottish naturalist Seton Gordon took his first photograph of a golden eagle eyrie, astonishingly, in April 1904, when he would have been 18 years old. He describes the incident in his 1955 book The Golden ...

It seems both odd and entirely apt that when I think of London poems the two lines that spring most readily to mind are the Scotsman William Dunbar's 'London thou art the flower of cities all' and the Lakelander William ...

The first visitor to my small and scruffy garden this year was a Hebrew Character, swiftly followed by Silver Y, Common Footman, Heart and Dart and the Engrailed. For someone like me who enjoys language as much as ...

I grew up on the North Sea coast of Yorkshire, and the particular coastal landscape, where cliffs give way to dunes and sand and shingle, and then to the supreme wilderness of the ocean, has always had for me a ...

Lars Iyer launches his novel Wittgenstein Jr at the Bookshop on Thursday 28 August, in conversation with Ray Monk. David Lea asked him a few questions about his book.

In describing your books to customers, I find it ...

I've been watching birds for as long as I've been reading, which is to say, for as near to half a century as makes no difference. Early forays were to our local RSPB reserve, to be confounded by winter plumage waders. ...

When I was a student leftie in the 1980s, and a very poor guitarist, Leon Rosselson was one of my great heroes, and his Big Red Songbook one of my most treasured possessions. You can imagine how excited I was, then, when ...

Irrelevantly, I was unable to sleep last night before I'd reminded myself of Borges's faux Chinese taxonomy:

(a) Those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) ...

Dumas' published works, according to Wiki, amount to a colossal 100,000 pages, although how many of them he actually wrote, and how many should be ascribed to his collaborator Auguste Maquet, remains a vexed issue. As if ...

I know there's no copyright in book titles, but I was nonetheless surprised by the appearance in Penguin's spring list of two books that draw on the same line from Marx for their titles – 'All that is solid melts into ...

What would you save from a house fire? For me, once I'd got the children out, the thing I'd be most likely to dive back into the flames to rescue would be my collection of field guides. Mostly, they're known simply by ...

It seems entirely fitting that our bestselling book in 2005 should have been Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories. Many of the pieces collected in it first appeared, in one form or another, in the pages of the London Review ...

David Lea recalls the self-indulgent fun of creating a bookshop that he and his friends would like to shop in - and on an obscure street in Bloomsbury.

For a bookseller, there's nothing quite like the challenge of a new ...