Biography

World War Bloody Timor gives a revealing insight into the extraordinary life of the everyday digger and service in a conflict that was far from ordinary. My name is Peter...

This is a biography of Henrik Ibsen. The author's intention has been to get behind the daunting outside image of the dramatist, in order to reveal the story of Ibsen's...

Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when formal schooling was denied to women, Mary Wortley Montagu was an admired poet, a consistently scandalous doyenne of eighteenth-century London society, and, in...

I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England...' The only child in...

This beautiful book gives new life to the values and thinking of the Che Guevara behind the legend, a man who was at once sensitive, passionate and determined to pursue...

'Jonathan Raban is the only person I listen to in matters of travel and books and writing in general. Reading him, talking to him as I have over fifty years,...

'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman 'The finest writer afloat since Conrad.' Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Guardian...

Beautifully produced and a perfect gift for travellers newly wedded or not - by turn funny, tender, acerbic and charming. Includes extracts from: Paul Bowles, Dorothy Sayers, D. H. Lawrence,...

The first full and authoritative biography of the father of gastronomy. MacDonogh not only chronicles BrillatAIs many pursuits, he also presents a fascinating picture of provincial France under the ancien...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER . The definitive biography of Colin Powell, from his Bronx childhood to his military career to his controversial tenure as secretary of state, with an updated afterword detailing...

In 1948, Robert Craft would begin a unique friendship with Stravinsky that would last until the composer's death in 1971. This book tells the story of his "improbable life" before,...

With the imminent television adaptation of the Gormenghast trilogy and the reissuing of his books, interest in Mervyn Peake''s work has never been higher. This biography is the result of...

The story of Nabokov's life continues with his arrival in the United States in 1940. He found that supporting himself and his family was not easy--until the astonishing success of...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A literary tour de force that chronicles a prize-winning author's descent into an almost suicidal depression. "Compelling ... Harrowing ... a vivid portrait of a debilitating...

Seven years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorised life of this brilliant, but famously enigmatic, man. Sutherland's account ranges from the depiction of Spender's cosmopolitan family (and...

"Long may he continue to divert us, " said "The New York Times" Book Review on its front page of Robertson Davies

One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major...

At the age of 21, a brilliant and highly eccentric graduate student made a major contribution to game theory: John Nash had discovered an influential theory of rational human behaviour....

The paintings and engravings of William Hogarth, the subject of this biography, have always been popular, but outside art history little is known about his life. He moved in the...

This book aims to provide the reader with a guide to Granada. Divided into ten routes, it takes the visitor, step-by-step, from the poet Federico Garcia Lorca's birthplace in the...

This second volume of the acclaimed Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence covers the years 1912-22, the period in which Lawrence forged his reputation as one of the greatest and...

William Maxwell, who died in July 2000, was revered as one of the twentieth century's great American writers and a longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker . Now writers...

Paris in the 1930s-melancholy, erotic, intensely politicized-provides the poetic beginning for this remarkable autobiography by one of America's most renowned literary scholars. In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert recaptures the...

In the years following World War I the way we perceive the world was turned upside down by a group of writers, painters and film-makers: the surrealists. Their aim was...

From the bestselling author of "The Snow Geese" comes a mesmerizing tribute to an adored older brother. When William Fiennes was a small boy, his parents inherited an extraordinary home:...

The first book of Graham Greene's letters - the most intimate record we have of a life lived at the heart of modern history One of the undisputed masters of...

This gripping biography of the great Czech novelist, diarist and short story writer chronicles Kafka's entire (if tragically curtailed) life (1883-1924), but it focuses upon the writer's relationship to his...

This delightful book recreates the busy, colorful world of a Catholic bishop and his flock from 1590-1620. Based upon the recently discovered daybook of Mathias Hovius, the book focuses not...

Seen by many as the culmination of Sartre's thought and project, and viewed by Sartre himself as an attempt to answer the question, "What, at this point in time, can...

Poet George Barker was convinced his biography could never be written - "I've stirred the facts around too much". Fraser's biography offers both a portrait of a talented, tormented and...

Although John Fowles's novels - among them The Magnus and the French Lueitenant's Woman - have enjoyed hugely critical and popular success around the world, little is known of Fowles...

The second volume in the Auden Studies Series, The Language of Learning and the Language of Love considers Auden primarily during the first decade of his literary career as a...

'I, the poet William Yeats, | With old mill boards and sea-green slates, | And smithy work from the Gort forge, | Restored this tower for my wife George; |...

Virginia Woolf was an inventive, witty correspondent, whether commenting on a domestic crisis, politics, or the roving of the writer's mind. Edited and with an Introduction by Joanne Trautmann Banks;...

As President Trump's National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is a...

This very honest, frank and personal account of moving from city to country life, from a dynamic career producing documentaries to the hard labour of agriculture, has the potential to...

James Watt is synonymous with the steam-engine, Promethean symbol of the Industrial Revolution. But what motivated him to re-invent steam? What convinced him that a simple idea - to give...

In the Robben Island prison register, Nelson Mandela was famously recorded as prisoner number 466/64. Number 468/64 was Ahmed Kathrada. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 in the infamous Rivonia...

The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher's intimate, hilarious and revealing recollection of what happened behind the scenes on one of the most famous film sets of all time, the first...

James Tiptree, Jr, burst onto the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a series of hard-edged, provocative stories. He redefined the genre with such classics as Houston, Houston,...

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...

Captain Rees Howell Gronow was a dandy, a debtor, a duelist and a raconteur who lived the high life in Regency London and Paris. He was also a talented writer...

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'Writing about yourself is a funny business...But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these...

'Mama, it's me.' I held her hand in mine, hoping it would give her the strength to hold on. Finally, she spoke, her voice barely above a whisper. ' Do...

The Raymond Chandler Papers brings together the correspondence and other previously uncollected writing of America's undisputed master of crime fiction and creator of the iconic private eye Phillip Marlowe, revealing...

From Martha Gellhorn's critically acclaimed biographer, the first collected letters of this defining figure of the twentieth-century Martha Gellhorn's heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines...

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....

Mass market edition of the much-loved broadcaster's raw and emotional story of the devastating impact of Covid-19 on her family - and how she finds strength in hope, even at...