Biography

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers...

Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable process by which experience became art. Michael Barber focuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material....

In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one...

Harold Nicolson, born in the late Victorian age, scion of a privileged family, was a man of extraordinary talents. As a diplomat a glittering career beckoned - an Embassy certainly,...

Backed up by previously unpublished papers and interviews with Brecht's colleagues and many lovers, this biography argues that Brecht was not in fact the author of the plays which have...

The book titled Selected Letters: v. 2 by the author Marcel Proust. This is a secondhand book. Please contact us for more information about this title.

Every Thursday for nearly a decade, Nagiub Mahfouz's brief column of recollection, refelction, and comment has appeared in the Al-Ahram Weekly. This celebratory volume, published on the occasion of the...

In Reading Chekhov Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer and journalist. Her close readings of Chekhov's stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from his life and...

FAMILY BUSINESS is not only a personal glimpse into the life of one of the great US poets, but also the moving story of a relationship between a father and...

The life of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is shrouded in mystery. There is no record of his having received an education, buying a book, or writing a single poem or...

Deidre Le Faye has edited this completely revised and expanded edition of W. and R.A.Austen-Leigh's 1913 biography of Jane Austen, long out of print but still widely regarded as the...

Shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards, Christopher Bland Prize and The People's Book Prize A Waterstones Best Memoir of 2024 An Independent and Stylist Best Non-Fiction Book The captivating true...

Offers a new approach to the life and work of Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Drawing on the recent discovery of many of her letters, the book examines the intricate network of...

Here for the first time is this controversial writer's real childhood and early adulthood. The mixed feelings of an intelligent, sensitive child - talented but tormented; the eventual separation from...

I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition. But for the young V. S....

Many know the public Yeats but few have managed to penetrate to the inner man, or to explore the relationship with his much younger wife, George. Here Brenda Maddox brings...

In chronicling the development and demise of the different relationships he's had while living in New York, Augusten Burroughs examines what it means to be in love, what it means...

The book titled Astounding Days by the author Arthur C. Clarke. This is a secondhand book. Please contact us for more information about this title.

In this haunting book, eminent psychiatrist Peter Dally explores the darker side of Virginia Woolf. Brin ging together his knowledge as a doctor and his fascination, he sheds light on...

' Screamingly funny and deliciously candid, full of wisdom and joie de vivre, this is memoir with the grip of a thriller ' ERIN KELLY Lynda La Plante has lived...

My Left Foot is Christy Brown's inspirational story of his early life, his battle against the restraints of cerebral palsy and his determination to learn to read, write, and paint,...

The book titled Continual Pilgrimage by the author Sawyer-Laucanno. This is a secondhand book. Please contact us for more information about this title.

Based upon an examination of original sources, this is a biography in which the figure of Charles Dickens and the moving spirit of his age are combined. Dickens the novelist,...

The first full biography of America's greatest living playwright Arthur Miller's life spans more than four decades and includes three marriages - famously to America's enduring icon, Marilyn Monroe -...

Primarily the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents, this is a description of the traditional English family background from which Isherwood, a pacifist and homosexual, felt impelled to escape. The couple...

The 12-year affair between Graham Greene and Catherine Walston, the sexually adventurous 1940s and 1950s society hostess, was only made public in a silence-shattering article in "The Sunday Times" after...

The star of this box is hiding in plain sight: all seven volumes of Boris Ford's landmark Pelican Guide to English Literature, the series that shaped how English literature was...

The name of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, is synonymous with excess. In this biography, Jeremy Lamb examines time the nature of Rochesters alcoholism and its implications for the...

Dylan Thomas was a sensation, both as a person and as a poet. His writing - short stories as well as verse - was hugely popular. He broadcast widely on...

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...

Manning Clark intimately reconstructs Lawson's agonising, and ultimately unsuccessful search for fulfilment of genius and happiness. Henry Lawson was a deeply divided man. He was a soul burdened with an...

In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published nivel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal...

More than a hundred years have passed since the creation of Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most famous fictional character of all time. But while the legendary detective lives on in...

Although before him Charles Perrault in France and the Brothers Gimm in Germany had collected and retold folk-tales in ways which found wide popular audiences, it was only with the...

This is the biography of one of Britain's best-known but least understood post-war personalities. Sportsman, womaniser, naval commander, traveller, spy - Fleming's successful and often mysterious life inevitably provided the...

Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is best known as the author of EVELINA, one of the most engaging novels of the eighteenth century. But for much of her long life, she was...

'Dazzling...full of special delights. Harman excels in the vivid presentation of scenes, the selection of detail...[a] marvellous and beautifully written book.' Elspeth Barker, Independent on Sunday At the age of...

'A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure...

The son of biologist T.H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background and was educated at Eton and Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned...

Since the success of "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" in 1964, Brian Friel has written over twenty plays, successively confirming his reputation as a major dramatist of the twentieth century. But...

An award-winning classicist turns to Greek tragedies for the wisdom to understand the damage caused by suicide and help those who are contemplating suicide themselves "Remarkable, brave and compassionate."-Rowan Williams,...

The aim of this study is to resolve discrepancies and correct errors in previous biographies and to attempt to fill serious and long-existing gaps in the story of Hazlitt's life....

Patrick O Brian, the late author of the immensely popular Aubrey-Maturin novels, zealously guarded the details of his past. Now Dean King an expert on nautical literature and on O...

With the insight only a novelist can provide, A. S. Byatt vividly conjures into being the world of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship...