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In Still Life with a Bridle, published by Notting Hill Editions, the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, discovers the extraordinary in the ordinary as he ventures abroad.

Just after crossing the Belgian-Dutch border, suddenly and without reason or reflection I decided to change...

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In this extract from the introduction to Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Michael Wood examines Barthes' grief on losing his mother.

We like to think grief is private and temporal; that it belongs to us and will come to an end. It's probably...

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Craig Moore on what making wedding speeches brought out of him.

There are really only two occasions when friends and family gather to discuss our narrative publicly - our wedding and our funeral - and we're only around to listen at the...

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An extract from Thoughts of Sorts by Georges Perec, published by Notting Hill Editions.

One of the main problems to be met by a man who keeps the books he has read or which he promises himself he will read one day...

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Abu Qatada smuggled himself on a false passport into this country in 1994. Instead of working to provide a roof and bread for his dependent family, he has devoted himself full time to teaching and preaching a version of the...

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Tom Kremer, the founder of Notting Hill Editions, argues that, with a longer-lived population and increasingly expensive medical care, a free-for-all NHS is no longer tenable.

Shortly after the Second World War, Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party and Prime...

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Jonathan Keates explains how guidebooks become increasingly impractical with time but remain vital, romantic historical documents, in an extract from his Notting Hill Editions book, The Portable Paradise.

I can't honestly remember how I began collecting guidebooks. It had something to do,...

Susan Greenfield, Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Oxford, explains how character is formed by a scientific process.

How do 'memory', 'mind' and 'consciousness' map on to circuits and networks of brain cells? And if these terms can indeed be expressed in neuroscientific terms, then where and how will the additional...

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Tom Kremer, founder of Notting Hill Editions, explains that the soundness of an economy is measured by how far expectations exceed the value of assets.

When will the recession finish? When will the economy be back on track? The implied image is...

The nature of national power has changed, writes Simon Heffer, author of A Short History of Power, published by Notting Hill Editions.

Countries now seek economic, rather than territorial, expansion. In his 1989 essay, The End of History, Francis Fukuyama was perhaps premature in contending that there had been...

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Tom Kremer, the founder of Notting Hill Editions, says active government intervention can have a benign, if limited, effect on an expanding economy, but rarely on a contracting one. During a recession, the government has no option but to spend less.

In...

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The House of Lords has been weak for half a millennium, writes Benedict King. New reforms would give it a taste of the glory days of medieval independence.

Reforming the House of Lords is back in the headlines again and, as in...

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There is only the closely-enmeshed interdependence of national economies, writes Tom Kremer, the founder of Notting Hill Editions. And that's not at all the same thing as a global economy.

Nowadays, the word 'global' trips too easily off the tongue. There are lots...

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Children's books are a preparation for adulthood, says children's author, Philip Womack. The best children's literature reflects and distorts grown-up life, allowing children to get used to troubling thoughts, before returning to safety in the last chapter.

If you mention, at a party,...

Notting Hill Editions Editor Lucasta Miller considers why the time is right for the re-emergence of the essay (www.nottinghilleditions.com, @NottingHillEds)

Intriguingly, it seems that the essay may tend to flower at moments of growth-spurts in the cultural history of the dissemination of the written word. As the growing influence of...

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It's still possible to make beautiful music out of conflict, says the writer Dennis Marks.

"My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They...

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Tom Kremer, the founder of Notting Hill Editions, says that what we desperately need is a new economic model, capable of predicting a crisis before it hits home.

In basic economic terms, asset is the counterpoint to expectation. It comprises all...

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The historian David Horspool says that we are wrong to think of medieval England as backward. It produced art, architecture and books - on display in a new British Library exhibition - of staggering sophistication.

There's a story in Peter Ackroyd's latest...

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Tom Kremer, the founder of Notting Hill Editions, says that the way we define the success of the economy is fundamentally flawed. Until we improve our definitions, we won't properly understand how and when things go wrong.

Language informs content and content...

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We are jettisoning lighthouses at our peril, writes Bella Bathurst, a lighthouse historian. Even in the age of GPS, they remain immensely useful, and retain deep symbolic power.

Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called The Lighthouse Stevensons about the construction...