It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die.

*A BOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021 IN THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY MAIL, SUNDAY TIMES AND GUARDIAN*The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion.

The updated edition of Julian Barnes’ best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays‘Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation.

Vintage Voyages: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mindWhat begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms.