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Kafka hardly ever left Prague during his short life. This text is more than a guidebook, it captures brilliantly the social, cultural and architectural atmosphere of his time as it takes the reader to many of the places that Kafka knew.
Fitzsimons’s eye-opening biography brings new light to the life and works of famed literary icon E. Nesbit, in whom pragmatism and idealism, tradition and modernity worked side-by-side to create a remarkable writer and woman.
Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant, serious mind combined with her striking image, her rigorous intellectualism and her groundbreaking inquiries into what was then seen as ‘low culture’ – celebrity, photographs, camp – propelled her into her own unique, inimitable category and made her famous the world over, emblematic of twentieth-century New York literary glamour. Today we need her ideas more than ever. Her writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism, Fascism, Freudianism, Communism, and Americanism, forms an indispensable guide to our modern world. Sontag was present at many of the most crucial events of the twentieth century: when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down, in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel and in besieged Sarajevo.
‘Fierce Bad Rabbits’ takes us on an eye-opening journey in a pea-green boat through the history of picture books. From Edward Lear through to Beatrix Potter and contemporary picture books like ‘Stick Man’, Clare Pollard shines a light on some of our best-loved childhood stories, their histories and what they really mean. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem – and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think. Sparkling with wit, magic and nostalgia, ‘Fierce Bad Rabbits’ weaves in tales from Clare’s own childhood, and her re-readings as a parent, with fascinating facts and theories about the authors behind the books. Introducing you to new treasures while bringing your childhood favourites to vivid life, it will make you see even stories you’ve read a hundred times afresh.
In London in 1958 a play by a 19-year-old redefined women’s writing in Britain. It also began a movement that would change women’s lives forever. The play was ‘A Taste of Honey’ and the author, Shelagh Delaney, was the first of a succession of very young women who wrote about their lives with an honesty that dazzled the world. They rebelled against sexism, inequality and prejudice and in doing so rejected masculine definitions of what writing and a writer should be. After Delaney came Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid Banks, Virginia Ironside, Charlotte Bingham, Margaret Forster and Nell Dunn, each challenging traditional concepts of womanhood in novels, films, television, essays and journalism. Not since the Brontës have a group of young women been so determined to tell the truth about what it is like to be a girl and proposed new ways to live and love in the future.
From the author of the beloved Bleaker House, Mrs Gaskell and Me is the story of two very modern women and their two love affairs, separated by a hundred and fifty years.
Following her father’s death, Katharine Smyth turned to her favourite novel, Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’, as a way of making sense of her bereavement. Written out of a lifelong admiration for Woolf and her work, Katharine’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish coasts and Bloomsbury squares, addressing universal questions about family, loss and homecoming. But ‘All the Lives We Ever Lived’, which braids memoir, biography, and literary criticism, is also an intimate reading of one woman’s talismanic text.
For over 20 years, people turned to A.A. Gill’s columns every Sunday – for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners – but mostly because he was the best. ‘By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age’, as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways.
Drawing on Anthony Powell’s letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew him, Hilary Spurling explores his life. Investigating the friends, relations, lovers, acquaintances, fools and geniuses who surrounded him, she reveals the comical and tragic events that inspired one of the greatest fictions of the age.
As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life. This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin.
As a bilingual bestselling novelist with a mixed Franco-British bloodline and a host of eminent forebears, Tatiana de Rosnay is the perfect candidate to write a biography of Daphne du Maurier. As an 11-year-old de Rosnay read and reread Rebecca, becoming a lifelong devotee of Du Maurier’s fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following Du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious 16-year-old, a 20-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady.
A.A. Gill’s writing: an embarrassment of riches. This selection of some of his recent pieces, spanning the last five years, sees him at his most perceptive, brilliant and funny. His subjects range from the controversial – fur – to the heartfelt – a fantastic crystallisation of what it means to be European. He tackles life drawing, designs his own tweed, considers boyhood through the prism of the Museum of Childhood and spends a day at Donald Trump’s university. His award-winningly acerbic review of Morrissey’s autobiography sits alongside the insight he brings to the work of Rudyard Kipling, Don McCullin and Lord Snowdon. And he turns that insight on himself in the terrific article ‘Life at Sixty’.
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