Showing 1–16 of 18 resultsSorted by latest
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£22.00
In this rich and engaging collection of essays, Tessa Hadley reflects on a lifetime of reading with the clarity and perceptiveness that have made her one of the most widely loved names in contemporary fiction. She charts her development as a lover of literature from a book-mad childhood shaped by libraries and imaginary worlds, through the long, uncertain years of writing and teaching, to the mature artistic vision that defines her work today. Here, Tessa Hadley turns to writers as varied as George Eliot and George Saunders, Tolstoy and Elizabeth Bowen, and looks closely at a handful of paintings. Throughout, her sharp eye, precise judgement, and instinct for style guides the reader towards the pleasures found in each text, and in a life made richer, deeper, and more fully imagined through art.
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£16.99
In this book, Emily Crane invites us to share her observations on the extraordinary and the everyday: stacks of washing up sit alongside musings on God; hot coffee accompanies thoughts about creativity; and memories of snails in her childhood garden slip in beside notes on writing, and books. We find Nietzsche living in a house-share with Keats, and a grieving Demeter keeps us company on wintry Sunday morning walks. Drawing upon philosophy, literature, mythology and memoir, ‘In Search of Lost Thoughts’ is an antidote to the stresses and distractions of the world we live in. Above all, it is a vivid and striking insight into what it means to be a young woman today.
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£11.99
An illuminating new essay collection from one of the most distinctive, exciting and acclaimed writers of her generation, Zadie Smith.
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£10.99
An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style.
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£20.00
One Christmas, Cathy Rentzenbrink finds herself drained by life’s upheavals. In need of comfort and escape, she turns to her first literary love: Agatha Christie. As Cathy delves into Agatha’s novels and her mysterious disappearance in 1926, she discovers more than she expected. Cathy unearths an adventurer and innovator who hid – within the pages of her own books – the secrets of how she survived a personal crisis and started life again. With the Queen of Crime at her side, Cathy soon begins finding answers to questions she hadn’t even realised she was asking.
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£25.00
Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suffragettes. Barbara Cartland made them fall in love. She wrote 723 books without touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap – and romantic fiction billowed out of her. This biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara – a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict and sexual peril. After 49 proposals, she chose the wrong one. What followed was a life stranger than any of her novels. From country house weekends to Fleet Street offices, from Mayfair bedrooms to the divorce court, Matthew Sweet traces Cartland’s extraordinary journey through a century of upheaval. Here are terrorist plots, psychic seances, suppressed scandals, plagiarism battles in the cutthroat world of romance publishing – and a surprising turn as a campaigner for Romany rights.
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£25.00
The maps they love, the maps they use, the maps that set them dreaming: this is a spellbinding compendium of writers’ thoughts on the wild landscapes of their imagination. Maps have the power to transport us, filled as they are with wonder and possibility. Here a team of internationally acclaimed writers and illustrators share their personal insights, encompassing not only the maps that appear in their books, but also the maps that have inspired them and the sketches they create in writing. Philip Pullman recounts a map he drew for an early novel; Robert Macfarlane reflects on his cartophilia, set off by Treasure Island; Joanne Harris tells of her fascination with Norse maps of the universe; Daniel Reeve describes working on The Hobbit films; Miraphora Mina recalls creating ‘The Marauder’s Map’ for Harry Potter. And there’s much more besides. Amidst a cornucopia of beautiful images, including unpublished sketches by authors, there ar
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£25.00
Tom Overton got to know John Berger around 2010, after he gave his archive to the British Library: a kind of homecoming to the city of his birth, after a life lived mostly in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France. Curious about the origin of a piece of writing or art, Tom would scan something in and email it. Then there’d come a call, very early, very late. ‘Hello? Is that Tom? This is John. John Berger. Can I tell you a story?’ Tom realised he was bringing this archive back into John’s life, peering together through holes in time, remembering things he couldn’t himself. And then, at the beginning of 2017, John died. In this book, Overton explores the life and work of one of the great cultural figures of the last century, who came of age in a world threatened by nuclear apocalypse, and grew old in a world dominated by the idea that human life should be ordered with the logic of profit, always looking forward, never back.
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£26.00
The long-awaited and revelatory biography of Hannah Arendt – one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century – and the story of an intellectual icon whose character and ideas continue to captivate and challenge us to this day.
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£12.99
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.
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£18.99
Peter Fiennes travels France in the footsteps of its greatest writers
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£18.99
We 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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£12.99
A new translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The story of Hans Castorp's seven-year stay at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland provides a serio-comic portrait of Europe before the First World War.
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£30.00
The 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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£22.00
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tar, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She asks us to look again at the young Michael Jackson and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
Little Learners Christmas 
