20th Century History

This text is part of the Character Sketches series, a fully illustrated historical guide to literary and artistic groups of the past. The book provides an introduction to London's bohemia...

Virtually from its first appearance in 1951, this book was considered one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 40s. In writing it...

Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Among the authors he examines...

A guide to English literature from 1900 to the present day. It combines a series of critical essays on understanding modern literature, drama, poetry and the contemporary historical background, with...

The pilgrimage of American writers to Paris began with Henry James over a century ago, and has continued in waves ever since. This book is not concerned with the "lost...

'Riveting, tragic tale' New Yorker 'Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion' Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak...

Sean O' Casey's Irish plays, among them "Juno and the Paycock", arguably place him amongst the great playwrights of the 20th century. This book explores the myth of O'Casey's slum...

While Carlo Collodi's internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book's appearance on the threshold of the modernist...

In his own lifetime, Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov was scarcely published. A quarter of a century after his death, his novel, "The Master and the Margarita", has become...

When it was published this was the full, post-glasnost critical biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), a great comic writer whose works are regarded as modern classics. This account of Bulgakov's...

Acting the Right Part is a cultural history of huaju (modern Chinese drama) from 1966 to 1996. Xiaomei Chen situates her study both in the context of Chinese literary and...

The essential translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries - revealing the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers Dating from 1909 to 1923,...

A collection of Bennett's diaries and essays, covering 2005 to 2015 Alan Bennett's third collection of prose, Keeping On Keeping On , follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful...

An "exhilarating" (Chicago Tribune) selection of Jack Kerouac's most personal, truthful, and mesmerizing letters that trace his life and craft-edited by Ann Charters "As we just now begin to map...

An extraordinary and hugely topical story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world. he Orientalist is the extraordinary story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world...

Anyone who cares to understand the cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must know of the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beats....

The definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most towering figures- her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her private face. Susan Sontag was our last...

In this biography of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) the author shows him through a life of tumultuous creativity through which he strove to bring new meaning to poetry, vision and politics....

The Edwardian age was a great age for English fiction. Many classic novels, some of them subsequently adapted for film and television, were first published then - Conan Doyle's The...

This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color...

This is a new edition of the first volume of the biography of the poet Robert Graves, giving an account of his early development. The author - the poet's nephew,...

Many years after the downfall of Oscar Wilde, Alfred Douglas, hoping to boost sales of his autobiography, asked Bernard Shaw to write the preface. An unlikely but enduring friendship developed...

This biography presents a richer and more comprehensive account of Thomas Hardy's life than has previously been available, as well as a more complex, balanced, and sympathetic view of Hardy...

Tells the story, via the letters they wrote to each other, of the relationship between Evelyn Waugh, author of "Brideshead Revisited", and Lady Diana Cooper, actress and hostess. The two...

With this second volume of autobiography Penelope Mortimer covers the three decades, from the acceptance of her first novel in 1945 ("intended as an immense historical saga about the collapse...

Gentle chaos sets in when the absent-minded Mr Pim calls in to see George Marden, bearing some innocent news... George is a fine upstanding citizen and a stickler for doing...

Lolita: on the cusp between fashion and cinema, childhood and adolescence, capriciousness and sensuality... The figure of the 'Lolita' embodies one of the most fascinating, but at the same time...

An essential new translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries - revealing the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers Dating from 1909 to...

The 'invigorating', 'stupendous' and 'exhilarating' guide (Observer) to the beguiling form which has attracted many of our most beloved writers 'It is hard to know how it could possibly be...

The radical, relatable, and playful love story between two extraordinary twentieth-century writers, revealed in selected letters and diary entries. 'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed...

The Sunday Times no. 1 memoir now in paperback The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carre's memoir and his first work of non-fiction, is a thrilling journey into the worlds of...

Elizabeth Smart's passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as 'Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightening ... A masterpiece'. One day,...

Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen...