Sean Sheehan

A plethora of new books has appeared this year, accompanied by a number of exhibitions, in response to the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the remarkable political energies it released worldwide throughout the twentieth century and its still contested historical legacy.

William Blake placed Dante alongside the prophets of the Old Testament, Homer and Shakespeare as an embodiment of poetic genius and he worked studiously on a series of drawings illustrating episodes from the Divine Comedy in the last years of life.

Scholarly research into ‘dead’ languages evolved over many centuries into an intellectual discipline which was to become the backbone of universities' humanities departments. The history of this progress is the subject of an impressive and hugely industrious new work.

The Dublin Notebook, appearing as the seventh volume in OUP’s collected Hopkins, is an exemplary work of scholarship and from now any serious piece of writing about the last phase of Hopkins’s life will rely on and be grateful for the painstaking work of its two editors.

At a time when the Bible’s importance is no longer at the centre of secular cultures, it is timely to consider the contribution of the Norton Critical Edition of the King James Bible. Detailed, yet accessible annotations demonstrate its continuing literary and artistic significance.

A new book seeks to consider writers' responses to Homer from an anticolonial or postcolonialist perspective.

Sebastião Salgado’s latest book of photographs represents nature more as a New Age dream of harmony rather than the random mayhem and violent contingency it actually is.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was careless of the fate of his poems, treated his muse like a slut and her children as an unwanted and vaguely sinful burden.