Biography: writers

Discover the long-kept secrets of literature's leading ladyYou've read Emma.

A canceled bestselling author's highly personal account of his public scandala scandal that was reported on the front page of the New York Times and throughout the world.

Christopher Marlowe, eine der faszinierendsten Figuren der englischen Renaissance, war nicht nur ein außergewöhnlicher Dramatiker, sondern auch ein Mensch voller Rätsel.

Written initially to guide his son, Benjamin Franklins autobiography is a lively, spellbinding account of his unique and eventful life, now a classic of world literature that is sure to inspire and delight readers everywhere.

For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last yearsIris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values.

For readers who enjoyed Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, this empowering collection of stories, poems and beautiful hand-drawn illustrations gives Once Upon a Time a much-needed modern makeover.

The classic biography of Alfred Wainwright.

Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist.

Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing his private self, The Summing Up, written when Maugham was sixty-four, is an inimitable expression of a personal credo.

Henry Green wrote his autobiography in 1940, aged only thirty-five, because he was convinced he wouldn't survive the war.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAY MCINERNEYJohn Cheever's letters offer a tantalising glimpse into the life of a writer.

An engaging look at the aphorism, the shortest literary form, across time, languages, and culturesAphorisms-or philosophical short sayings-appear everywhere, from Confucius to Twitter, the Buddha to the Bible, Heraclitus to Nietzsche.

The remarkable transformation of Orwell from journeyman writer to towering iconIs George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived?

Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest account of Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians, and the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris.

A delightful insight into the formation of an artist who would become one of the world's most respected writers.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION'Vivid and empowering' GILLIAN ANDERSON'A stunning book' BERNARDINE EVARISTO'Dazzling' TARA WESTOVER'A story about hope, imagination and resilience'GUARDIANAn award-winning, inspiring memoir of family, education and resilience.

Christopher Fowler's memoir captures life in suburban London as it has rarely been seen: through the eyes of a lonely boy who spends his days between the library and the cinema, devouring novels, comics, cereal packets - anything that might reveal a story.

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg - an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius - were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard.

When James Matthew Barrie died, in 1937, his funeral was an occasion for national mourning.

In the Middle Ages, mules were used to transport goods across Britain.

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war.

You've installed your breadmaker in your kitchen, bought a couple of books and made delicious breads with rye flour, with seeds on top or even with chocolate and hazelnuts.

Literature Book of the Year, Sunday Times'Terrific' Guardian'Enthralling' Spectator'Magisterial' Daily Telegraph'Unsurpassable' New York Review of BooksBy the time Herzog was published in 1964, Saul Bellow was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America, described in later years by the critic James Wood as the greatest writer of American prose in the twentieth century.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2014Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best BiographyNew York Times Book Review s 10 Best Books of the YearPenelope Fitzgerald (1916 2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms.

'Why should Truth be a woman?

Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought.

A moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost men: a father and his child.

Each house, like each place, has its own topography, its own lore.

FROM THE ONE-OF-A-KIND IMAGINATION THAT BROUGHT US SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 AND CAT'S CRADLE 'Kurt Vonnegut is either the funniest serious writer around or the most serious funny writer' Los Angeles Times Book Review An 'autobiographical collage' of speeches, stories and essays, in Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut writes beguilingly about everything from country music to George Bush, his favourite comedians to his mother's midnight mania, and bittersweet tributes to a dead best friend and a dead marriage.

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life.

In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles.

Graham Greene's 'long journey through time' began in 1904, when he was born into a tribe of Greenes based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster.

"e;It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec"e; - Gilbert Adair, Sunday TimesWinner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation.

The second volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon.

A raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of Ellroy's novels.

Joseph Conrad's impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point.

He was born in the year Dr Johnson died, and died in the year A.

At the time of his death at the age of 95, Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was the most famous historian in the world.

From Barnardo boy to original virgin soldier; from apprentice journalist in London's Fleet Street to famous novelist.

Robert Hughes, one of the most illuminating minds ever to have taken on the subjects of art and culture, uses his same critical abilities to give us a brutally intimate account of his early life, up until the time he quit Australia for the United States.

As the creator of Sherlock Holmes, 'the world's most famous man who never was', Arthur Conan Doyle remains one of our favourite writers; his work is read with affection - and sometimes obsession - the world over.

In the summer of 1941, as the Germans invade Russia, newspaper reporter Vasily Grossman is swept to the frontlines, witnessing some of the most savage atrocities in Russian history.

Bruce Chatwin's death in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia.

Yet Being Someone Other is the most revealing book that Laurens van der Post wrote about his extraordinary and eventful life, and the most far-reaching; it is a distillation of the experiences that have moved him at the deepest level of the imagination and made him the exceptional person and writer he was.

Explorer, novelist, writer and film-maker, Sir Laurens van der Post was one of the most influential figures of our era.

Presented together now for the first time, Laurens van der Post's collected writings will reveal as never before the fullness of his perceptive, wise and remarkably consistent vision.

The classic evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change.

In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, G nter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives.

The landmark study of Woolf and her world, a classic of contemporary life-writing.