All the Dogs of My Life
£10.99A tantalizing glimpse into the life of acclaimed writer Elizabeth von Arnim told via the lives of the many dogs she owned from childhood to old age.
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The Great Good Places
£18.99We all age differently, some stoically, some angrily, some calmly, some with an unfailing spirit of adventure and an undimmed curiosity. From one of our finest literary voices, this book is a collection of essays, stories and memoir that traverses the experience of growing older and looking back on a life deeply lived. Drawing on decades of reading, writing and observation, Margaret Drabble reflects on the complex business of ageing, the strange workings of memory – its wonders and its fragility – and on the ‘great good places’, the childhood homes, coastal sanctuaries and cherished libraries that shape who we are. Rich with a lifetime’s worth of insight and wisdom and peppered with Drabble’s trademark lucidity and wit, this volume is an elegantly layered and profoundly moving meditation on time, place and the enduring power of recollection.
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Jan Morris
£25.00When Jan Morris joined the 1953 Everest expedition and was first to get news of the ascent back to London, she became the most famous journalist in the world. So began a glittering career covering the Eichmann trial, interviewing Che Guevara and scooping the story of Suez collusion. Morris transitioned in the early seventies and documented the experience in Conundrum. She was a pioneer and her books, including ‘Venice’ and the ‘Pax Britannica’ trilogy, have inspired readers across the globe. Here, renowned travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler uncovers the complexity of this 20th-century icon to reveal a mosaic of contradictions. Morris’s work conjured the spirit of place, yet her late masterpiece Trieste celebrates ‘the meaning of nowhere’; she was a Welsh nationalist who wasn’t Welsh; a preacher of kindness with a cruel side. This is a portrait of an astonishing life, and a scintillating story of longing, travel and never reaching
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Gertrude Stein
£12.99A biography as unconventional and surprising as the life it tells. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan. Gertrude Stein remains one of the most confounding – and contested – writers of the 20th century. The host of glamorous salons at 27 rue de Fleurus, brushing shoulders with Picasso and Hemingway in her long brown robe, Stein never ceased plotting her own legacy. She would be known as the literary innovator of her time. And her enigmatic partner, Alice B. Toklas, would make sure of it.
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Come to Dinner
£12.99A rare, revelatory portrait of Joan Didion — told not through her essays or fame, but through fifty years of unshakable friendship… and food! When journalist and novelist Sara Davidson met Joan Didion in the 1970s, neither could have predicted the decades of dinners, deep conversations, and quiet rituals that would follow. In Come to Dinner, Davidson opens the door to their private world, offering an intimate memoir of literary sisterhood — one filled with tenderness, wit, and the kind of wisdom exchanged only across time and trust. From Malibu beach walks to Manhattan suppers, shared grief to unguarded hilarity, Davidson captures the Joan few ever saw: fiercely loyal, disarmingly funny, and unwavering in her support of other women writers. What emerges is not a biography, but a deeply human portrait of Joan as a friend, mentor, and kindred spirit. For fans of The Year of Magical Thinking, Sontag: Her Life and Work, and Let Me Tell
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Baldwin
£30.00The first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, this book reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on archival material and original research and interviews, Nicholas Boggs tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.
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A History of France in 21 Women
£18.99The brilliant and sometimes scandalous lives of twenty-one women who made French history.
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A Spy Amongst Us
£25.00The true story of Daniel Defoe and the dirty tricks which helped bring Scotland into union with England. In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fearing the end of Scottish sovereignty. But unbeknownst to the mob, a spy was in their midst – the English writer Daniel Defoe, now bankrupt and thrice pilloried, had turned a government agent. Marc Mierowsky tells the dramatic story of Defoe and his fellow spies as they sabotaged the Scottish independence movement from the inside. Together they disseminated propaganda and built a network of operatives from London to the upper Highlands, providing the English government with up-to-the-minute intelligence and monitoring its adversaries’ every move.
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Friends in Youth
£16.99At the Inns of Court, the intellectual, literary, and social heart of early 17th century London, many pivotal friendships were forged: few closer than that of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward (Ned) Hyde. Both young men were lively characters, industrious, well-connected, principled and optimistic. They dreamed of reforming the government of Charles I, a young court with age-old problems, by restoring the traditional harmony of Crown and Parliament. This is the story of how their hopes climbed, overreached, and fell into an abyss of relentless civil war.
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It ShouldnT Happen To A Vet
£11.99A Macmillan Collector’s Library edition of the second volume of James Herriot’s hilarious memoirs about life as a country vet.