Staff Profile – James
8 January 2026
Get to know James, one of our booksellers
James is one of our booksellers. He is our resident poetry expert, his reading leans towards novels with beautiful prose, but also enjoys reading philosophy. His three picks for desert island reads are; Shibboleth by Michael Donaghy, The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker and Bad News by Edward St Aubyn.
‘Dearest, note how these two are alike: This harpsichord pavane by Purcell, And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.’ These are the opening lines of ‘Machines’, the first poem in Michael Donaghy’s debut collection, Shibboleth, from 1988. A love poem, in case you couldn’t tell. It’s like the metaphysical poetry of John Donne or George Herbert, but written by a regular guy from the Bronx who just happened to be a genius. And by the end of this first poem you’ll find yourself thinking, ‘Huh, now that you mention it I guess Baroque music and bicycles kind of are alike.’
Steven Pinker is probably my favourite living science writer. He’s a neuroscientist and linguist who teaches at Harvard, and in The Language Instinct he brings his two specialisms together to explore how language evolved in our species, and how it’s created and interpreted in our brains. Pinker has the rare ability to explain complex ideas simply and clearly, and he makes his points with a joke wherever he can.
Last, I’ll pick Bad News by Edward St Aubyn, the second book in the Patrick Melrose series. In the first book Patrick was abused by his aristocratic father as a child, and now he’s a traumatised drug addict living in New York. When he hears his father has died, Patrick first goes to the morgue to make sure, then he celebrates by scoring some heroin and spending the night having arguments with his multiple personalities. It’s one the darkest and funniest novels I’ve ever read. And surprisingly moving.