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A beautiful, tactile book of inspiring quotes and images by Frida Kahlo; illuminating a life spent in creative transformation – turning physical suffering into beauty, endurance into empowerment, immobility into imagination
De Beauvoir lived her feminist philosophy. She never married or had children, she had many affairs with both men and women, and she actively defied societal norms for women of her time. At the same time she conducted an intense, long-term relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who she referred to as her husband. Beauvoir and Sartre met as philosophy students in Paris in 1929. For over 50 years, until their deaths in the 1980s, the couple had a close, open relationship. This book contains her love letters to him, revealing the details of her everyday life and her passion for the man who shared her ideals. It is an intimate portrait of a woman living in an adventurous, complicated way in the name of individual freedom. De Beauvoir and Sartre are buried together under a shared gravestone in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.
‘Ghost Stories’ is Siri Hustvedt’s most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over 40 years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul’s cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster’s last ever piece of writing – the first 35 pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri’s and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 202
This is Alan Bennett’s fourth collection of diaries and prose. Covering the turbulent years 2016 to 2024, the diaries take us through lockdown, Brexit, the reign of Johnson, the rise of Trump and the death of the Queen. In between, we take the train with him back and forth to Yorkshire, celebrate the herons, the newts and the street fairs, and lament the scarcity of curlews, the closure of the last local bank and the deteriorating welfare state. There is the premiere of Allelujah!, the revived Talking Heads, the publication of two Sunday Times bestsellers and the filming of The Choral. 2024 is the year that Alan turns ninety; he reflects on old age and the importance of luck. He looks back to childhood and recalls an idyllic wartime month as an evacuee.
In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. And by war’s end Berlin’s population had fallen by almost half. Among the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Buruma’s own father, a prisoner conscripted into forced labour in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported work
If you could write a letter to your younger self, what would it say? ‘Letter To My Younger Self’ is back with another incredible selection of letters from well-known figures. In this edition, interviewer Jane Graham asks one simple question to a wide range of women from the worlds of entertainment, politics, food, sport, literature and business. This collection of 50 of the most moving, inspiring and honest letters includes Fearne Cotton on battling imposter syndrome, Billie Piper on feeling burnt out, Dame Kelly Holmes on not giving up, Nancy Sinatra on marrying young and so much more.
An A-Z of Royal Tales and Surprising Wisdom from Princess Margaret's Lady in Waiting
What is more personal, more intimate, than the diary? Throughout time and across the world, humans from all walks of life have kept diaries: they are the repositories of our most unvarnished truths, our most poignant hopes, hidden desires and our deepest fears. Now, in ‘Diaries of Note’, Shaun Usher collects 366 of the most noteworthy diary entries ever written, one for each day of the leap year, each authored by a different individual. The diary welcomes all to its pages, and through this book you will encounter world leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, Theodore Roosevelt and Emperor Uda, artists and writers, like Frida Kahlo, Seamus Heaney, David Sedaris and Shirley Jackson, film stars and musical icons, including Brian Eno, Emma Thompson and Elton John, as well as people whose lives were never illuminated by fame – yet their diaries reveal them to have been extraordinary.
A timeless story rediscovered by each new generation, The Diary of a Young Girl continues to bring to life the experiences of Anne Frank, who for a time survived the worst horror the modern world had seen.
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