Showing 157–168 of 211 resultsSorted by latest
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£14.99
Jan Morris is one of the great British writers of the post-war era. Soldier, journalist, writer about places (rather than ‘travel writer’), elegist of the British Empire, novelist, she has fashioned a distinctive prose style that is elegant, fastidious, supple, and sometimes gloriously gaudy. For many readers she is best known for her candid memoir ‘Conundrum’, which described the gender reassignment operation she underwent in 1972. But as ‘Ariel’ demonstrates, this is just one of the many remarkable facts about her life. As James Morris she was the journalist who brought back the story of the conquest of Everest in 1953 and who discovered incontrovertible evidence of British involvement in the Suez Crisis of 1956. She has been described by Rebecca West as the finest prose stylist of her time, and her essays span the entire urban world.
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£20.00
A unique selection of the greatest thinkers from the fields of philosophy, political theory, sociology, art, architecture and literature, with enjoyable profiles of what they have to teach to us today.
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£9.99
LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A book like no other – the tale of a gripping quest to discover the identity of history’s most notorious murderer and a literary high-wire act from the legendary writer and director of Withnail and I.
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£20.00
‘Riveting, tragic tale’ New Yorker
‘Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion’ Financial Times
The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya – the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago.
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£8.99
The contrasting lives of the Mitford sisters – stylish, scandalous and tragic by turns – hold up a mirror to upper-class life before and after the Second World War.
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£25.00
The Bronte story has been written many times but rarely as compellingly as by the Brontes themselves. In this selection of letters and autobiographical fragments we hear the authentic voices of the three novelist sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, their brother, Branwell, and their father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte.
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£9.99
From bestselling author Bill Bryson comes this compelling short biography of William Shakespeare, our greatest dramatist and poet.
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£10.99
A vivid and moving account of the remarkable friendship between the writer Edith Olivier and the young artist Rex Whistler
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£12.00
This beautifully illustrated biography follows Frid Kahlo’s exceptional life and work, and celebrates the Mexican icon’s legacy.
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£9.99
He was a debt-ridden dandy, a mid-ranking novelist armed with enormous political ambition. She was a moneyed widow 12 years older than her new husband, always overdressed for society dinners and never one to hold her tongue. From the outset, Mary Anne and Benjamin Disraeli made an unlikely match, yet they rose to the very pinnacle of Victorian society. Drawing on the couple’s love letters and Mary Anne’s own formidable archives, Daisy Hay reveals the heady mix of romance and power that fuelled their influence – and chronicles how the couple crafted their unconventional marriage into an enduring love story.
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£25.00
Charlotte Bronte’s life contained all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. She was raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors and sent away to brutally strict boarding school at a young age. She watched helpless growing up as, one by one, her five beloved siblings sickened and died; by the end of her short life, she was the only child of the Brontë clan remaining. And most fascinating and tragic of all, throughout her adult life she was haunted by a great and unrequited love – a love that tortured Charlotte but also inspired some of the most moving, intense and revolutionary novels ever written in the English language. Charlotte was a literary visionary, a feminist trailblazer and the driving force behind the whole Brontë family.
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£25.00
John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood – the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by ‘sixteen hugless years’ in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man – through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. This is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.
