Showing 49–60 of 130 resultsSorted by latest
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£25.00
Where is ‘home’? For Amartya Sen home has been many places – Dhaka in modern Bangladesh where he grew up, the village of Santiniketan where he was raised by his grandparents as much as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged nineteen. Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these. Central to his formation was the intellectually liberating school in Santiniketan founded by Rabindranath Tagore (who gave him his name Amartya) and enticing conversations in the famous Coffee House on College Street in Calcutta. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he engaged with many of the leading figures of the day. This is a book of ideas as much as of people and places.
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£20.00
The third son of a coalminer, David Storey takes us from his tough upbringing in Wakefield, to being ‘sold’ to Leeds Rugby League Club, to his escape to the Slade School of Art and his life in post-war London. He describes shocking scenes in the seventeen deprived East End schools in which he taught. He documents the childhood death of his eldest brother, addressing much of the memoir to him and exploring how this relates to his own sometimes paralysing depression, which haunted most of his life. And yet, a prolific and celebrated writer, he recalls heady spells in New York, close relationships in the theatre with Joycelyn Herbert, Ralph Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, early success with ‘This Sporting Life’, and winning the Booker Prize for his novel ‘Saville’.
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£9.99
Natasha Trethewey was born in Mississippi in the 60s to a black mother and a white father. When she was six, Natasha’s parents divorced, and she and her mother moved to Atlanta. There, her mother met the man who would become her second husband, and Natasha’s stepfather. While she was still a child, Natasha decided that she would not tell her mother about what her stepfather did when she was not there: the quiet bullying and control, the games of cat and mouse. Her mother kept her own secrets, secrets that grew harder to hide as Natasha came of age. When Natasha was nineteen and away at college, her stepfather shot her mother dead on the driveway outside their home. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, ‘Memorial Drive’ is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence.
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£25.00
In a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has been one of Britain’s best-loved and most versatile writers. With ‘Varying Degrees of Success’ he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. His aim is to describe honestly and in some detail the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres: prose fiction, literary criticism, plays for live theatre and screenplays for film and television.
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£9.99
Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and conserve clothes centuries old, the inscrutable remnants of lives long lost to history; the commonplace or remarkable things that survive the bodies they once encircled or adorned. In ‘Patch Work’, Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother’s black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear.
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£9.99
The Gospel of the Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish-the eel-and a reflection on the human condition.
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£8.99
‘Mortality’ is Christopher Hitchens’s unsparingly honest account of the ravages of cancer, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this moving and personal account of illness, Hitchens confronts his own death and remains combative, eloquent and dignified to the very last.
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£12.99
Christopher Hitchens traces his journey from a Portsmouth military family to Balliol College, and a career as a public intellectual, wit and controversialist. He provides vivid accounts of his friendships and famous feuds, as well as his attacks on Mother Teresa and the Almighty Himself.
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£10.99
Introduced by leading historian Helen Graham, Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War.
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£10.99
George Orwell’s famous account of his own experience living in poverty in Paris then London. With an introduction by Lara Feigel.
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£7.99
Laurie Lee walked out of his childhood village one summer morning to travel the world, but he was always drawn back to his beloved Slad Valley, eventually returning to make it his home. In this portrait of his Cotswold home, Laurie Lee guides us through its landscapes, and shares memories of his village youth – from his favourite pub, The Woolpack, to winter skating on the pond, the church through the seasons, local legends, learning the violin and playing jazz records in the privy on a wind-up gramophone. Filled with wry humour and a love of place, ‘Down in the Valley’ is a writer’s tribute to the landscape that shaped him, and where he found peace.
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£20.00
The long-awaited autobiography of John Cooper Clarke, the Bard of Salford, punk poet, rock star, fashion icon, national treasure and acerbic wit.
