Biography: writers

In David Lodge's last novel, Thinks.

'The next Bill Bryson.

A fascinating account of the life of one of the century's great eccentrics - the brilliant Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director.

The facts of life and death remain the same.

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'She'd been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years - which were his final twenty-seven years.

'If men could see us as we really are, they would be amazed', wrote Charlotte Bront , the outwardly conventional parson's daughter who had rarely met any men beyond those of the church or classroom by the time Jane Eyre was published in 1847.

Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is best known as the author of EVELINA, one of the most engaging novels of the eighteenth century.

In a memoir as vivid and unpredictable as any novel we follow Roger Garfitt on his journey from stable boy to jazz dancer, from Oxford dandy to Sixties drop-out.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOWIn 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTONSubtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London s Bohemia.

In this sequel to The Flame of Thika, Elspeth Huxley takes up her story after the family returns to Kenya after the First World War.

In the winter of 1849, Florence Nightingale was an unknown 29-year-old - beautiful, well-born and deeply unhappy.

In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin.

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation.

A critical discussion of Pound s poetry and an insightful analysis of his sources.

Christy Brown was born a victim of cerebral palsy.

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love?

The definitive biography of Daphne Du Maurier, one of history's greatest psychological thriller novelistsRebecca, published in 1938, brought its author instant international acclaim, capturing the popular imagination with its haunting atmosphere of suspense and mystery.

The distinguished poet, essayist and critic D.

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'.

A brilliant follow-up to Hidden Lives, Margaret Forster's most personal book yet takes up the story of her gritty, northern father, Arthur, intertwined with that of her sister-in-law, Marion, who died of cancer at almost half the age of the 96 year-old Arthur.

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age.

Antonia White is best known for her masterpiece Frost in May, for having come back from Bedlam and madness, and for the public feud between her daughters over the editing of her diaries.

No modern philosopher has been more maligned and misunderstood or more cynically exploited than Friedrich Nietzsche.

A fascinating and wonderfully readable deconstruction of the countless myths that have grown up around the Bront s.

Auden's dedication as a writer was matched only by his commitment to challenging the received view of political and personal life.

John Cheever's journals reveal the inner life of this remarkable writer and the contradictions that drove him.

In a series of long essays, James Wood examines the connection between literature and religious belief, in a startlingly wide group of writers.

Elegant, provocative and hugely entertaining, Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family, acquaintances (and a few eminent foes).

Four questions consumed Shelley and coloured everything he wrote.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the author of Vanity Fair and step-aunt of Virginia Woolf, was also a fine writer.

Donkey's Years and Dog Days were the first two volumes of these remarkable memoirs, of which The Whole Hog now completes the Higgins Bestiary.

Victoria Glendinning provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother.

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution.

How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality?

'Martin Amis is a seriously good writer, and never on better form than now.

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

'George Sand' (Aurore Dupin, 1804-1876) was France's bestselling writer, rivalled in her time only by Victor Hugo.

Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more.

The first volume of John Fowles's Journals ended with him achieving international literary renown after the publication of The Collector and The Magus, and leaving London behind to live in a remote house near Lyme Regis.

In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector.

In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the mind'.

Philip Roth is the voice of our times.

Here, for the first time, is a riveting collection of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal writings composed sinced 1963, ranging from essays and literary criticism to commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs and musings.

Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism.

"e;Wonderful .

A fascinating, evocative account of 19th-century London, so well-known from Charles Dickens’ much-loved novels.

Journey to the seventeenth century and a dramatic period of political upheaval, plague, and fire, with this "e;vivid portrait of Restoration England"e; (History Today).