“At the time of my first reading, I didn’t have the patience to sift. It had not yet occurred to me that the pile itself could be the treasure.”

Barbara Comyns’s daring depiction of childbirth.Some books need no introduction because they’re better if you don’t know what to expect, and it occurs to me that Our Spoons Came from Woolworths might be one of those books. Certainly I wasn’t prepar…

In 2008 Luca Turin, a European biochemist who’d done groundbreaking research on how olfaction works, joined forces with Tania Sanchez, a thirtyish American, to produce an English edition of his cult hit French perfume guide. The result, their Perfu…