Biography

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...

One golden summer afternoon in 1862, on the banks of the River Thames, the young Oxford mathematics don Charles Dodgson shared a picnic with three little girls, who asked for...

A lively and insightful literary life, highly acclaimed on hardback publicationVirginia Woolf once mused that no biographer had ever been 'subtle enough and bold enough to present that queer amalgam...

A detailed, illustrated examination of Edith Wharton's life provides a look at the social and political atmosphere in which she lived, offering insights into how her personal history affected her...

James Boswell died a disappointed man, considered by his contemporaries to be a "foolish failure". Yet today his "Life of Johnson" is esteemed as the template for modern biography and...

The 30th anniversary edition of Tobias Wolff's "extraordinary memoir" (SF Chronicle), now with a new introduction by the author

From the author of the bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran comes a powerful and passionate case for the vital role of fiction today. Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified...

A portrait of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, fighting for his work and his life in a society riven with fear of Stalin's tyranny Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in...

Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite de Crayencour in Brussels in 1903. She lost her mother at birth, her native Belgium at the age of six, and was forced to flee...

This biography illuminates and explores the complexities and contradictions of Burns's character and personality, untangling the myth from the legend. Based on new evidence from 700 letters Burns wrote during...

Winner of the 1990 James Tate Memorial Prize for Biography, this work lays bare a literary mystery, the true story of the secret 13-year relationship between Charles Dickens and the...

A biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the writer of "The School for Scandal" and "The Rivals". The text argues that Sheridan's Irishness was a crucial factor in his drive for...

Stage Directions covers half a lifetime and the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a new piece about his latest play, Afterlife. It is also a reflection...

Marcel Reich-Ranicki has lived a colourful and picaresque life. Born in 1920 of Polish Jewish parents, he spent his youth in Berlin until the Nazis came to power. In 1938...

J. M Synge was born in 1871 into a strictly Protestant upper-middle-class Irish family. He spent his short life in a variety of situations; with his widowed evangelical mother, in...

Green shoots, green leaves, California green vesicles be-neath the California green-brown mud. A hormonal transition is a new start, but it is not a new start like a shoot emerges...

A compulsively readable account of the tumultuous lives of jazz-age literary icons Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. this thought-provoking book tells the story of Zelda Sayre, a talented and...

The respected singer and songwriter describes her journey of loss, grief, and recovery following the 1992 suicide of her son and the near-death of her companion of fifteen years, after...

In this magnificent biography--a work that won three of the most prestigious literary prizes this country offers--W. Jackson Bate delves deep into the character that formed Johnsons awesome intellect and...

From global bestseller and creator of Jack Reacher, comes Lee Child's first-ever autobiographical collection. From global bestseller and creator of Jack Reacher, comes Lee Child's first-ever autobiographical collection. On Monday...

Josphine Cox returns to the land of her birth, the environment which provides so many settings for her novels, and in the company of her fictional characters rediscovers the influences...

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...

Discover the real Judi Dench through a series of intimate conversations about the love of her life - Shakespeare Taking a curtain call with a live snake in her wig;...

'Screamingly funny and deliciously candid, full of wisdom and joie de vivre, this is memoir with the grip of a thriller' ERIN KELLY 'A rollercoaster ride' THE TIMES 'Fascinating and...

Secondhand Literary Criticism Bargain Book Box Dive into the minds of literary giants and the critical interpretations of their works with our Secondhand Literary Criticism Bargain Book Box. Each book...

Boy: Tales of Childhood is the story of Roald Dahl's very own boyhood. Including takes of sweet-shops and chocolate, mean old ladies and a Great Mouse Plot - the inspiration...

A follow-up to Margaret Forster's "Hidden Lives" (a family memoir of three generations of women), this account takes up the story of her gritty northern father. He was not a...

Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration. As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and...

Daniel Defoe's life (1660-1731) was packed with incident and drama. Born in the year of the Restoration of the Monarchy after the English Civil War, he remained a Nonconformist throughout...

Newspaper articles written between 1911 and 1925 describe the author's life in the years following those covered in her children's books.

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets....

The author shares his observations on the New Age world, UFO conspiracies, the Internet, the apocalypse, commercialism, harmonic convergences, numerology, and other topics.

Dylan Thomas's letters to the many women in his life most important among them his wife Caitlin are among the most beautiful and lyrical he wrote. Provoked on the most...

This complete and unabridged edition is the only complete critical edition in paperback. Samuel Johnson was a poet, essayist, dramatist, and pioneering lexicographer, but his continuing reputation depends less on...

Published by Penguin for more than fifty years, Evelyn Waugh is one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. In this irreverent personal account of the crowning of...