The North Road, in which Rob Cowen journeys along the A1 between Edinburgh and London, and through memoir, history and fiction, is “an astonishing book in its scope and vitality”, Katharine Norbury says in a five-star review for the Telegraph.

In The Literary Review, Peter Rose considers an account of the travels of Henry James on his return from Sussex to his birthplace of America in 1904 — “an odyssey of ‘continental dimensions’, as Peter Brooks calls it in Henry James Comes Home (New York Review Books)…With the assumptive omniscience of the biographer, Brooks writes that James recognised ‘the ineradicable depth of his American roots. In returning to the United States he was obeying some almost primal drive.’”

Rose writes that “James was shocked by the squalor in the South. He lamented the ostentatious wealth and was cutting about America’s new ‘hotel-civilisation’. America was not dedicated to equality but to what he called ‘eligibility’ through accumulated wealth.”