Literary Studies

Hearing stories can help children manage their emotions, empathize with others and better understand the complex world we live in. But more importantly storytelling cultivates a rich and meaningful bond between parent and child, building intimacy and trust. In How to Tell Stories to Children, educators Silke Rose West and Joseph Sarosy distil the key ingredients for storytelling into a surprisingly simple technique for creating imaginative stories from the events, objects and activities in yo...

In Making Sense, David Crystal confronts the foe of many: grammar. Once taught relentlessly to all students in the English-speaking world, grammar disappeared from most school curricula, so that terms such as "preposition" and "conjunction" now often confound children and adults alike. Explaining the nuts and bolts of grammar presents a special challenge, because - far more than is the case with spelling and punctuation - the subject is burdened with a centuries-old history of educational pra...

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections of the ancient world to the embattled ...