An intimate portrait of London intellectual life, the breakdown of a marriage and the friendship between two women, 'What You Will' draws the reader into a spellbinding world of beauty and tension.
Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, invites us to imagine a mythical society free from sexual intrigue, free from jealousy, free from petty rivalries: a society free from men.
The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday).
From the International Man Booker Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't and The End of the Story - a crystalline collection of literary essays for fans of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion'Among my most favourite writers.
A Sunday Times Top 10 BestsellerIn this remarkable memoir of love, loss and literature, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin turns her eye to another fascinating literary life: her own.
A playful, form-bending novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Playful and audacious' Independent Narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, Artful slips slyly between fiction and essay, guiding the reader thrillingly through a sequence of ideas on art and literature.
'A landmark biography' The Times, Books of the YearThe long-awaited portrait of a literary master from one of our generation's greatest biographersAnthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an undisputed classic of English literature.
Vidal on Vidal - a great and supremely entertaining writer on a great and endlessly fascinating subjectPalimpsest is Gore Vidal's account of the first thirty-nine years of his life as a novelist, dramatist, critic, political activist and candidate, screenwriter, television commentator, controversialist, and a man who knew pretty much everybody worth knowing (from Amelia Earhart to Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, Jack Kennedy, Jaqueline Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Andre Gide, and Tennessee Williams, and on and on).
From Feydeau to Fitzgerald, from Hugo to Hemingway, the Paris locations that have influenced modern literatureA photographic stroll around the bookshops, famous literary restaurants and storied streets of Europe's favourite tourist destinationLiterary Landscapes: Paris takes this major European city and with picture perfect photography, compiles an album of memorable views linked to the words of Parisian authors, or writers who made Paris their home.
'Superb, beautifully written, touching and occasionally very funny' Andrew RobertsDavid Gilmour's superb biography of Rudyard Kipling is the first to show how the life and work of the great writer mirrored the trajectory of the British Empire, from its zenith to its final decades.
In this collection of Greek fiction written between the first and fourth centuries AD, 'Callirhoe' is the stirring tale of star-crossed lovers Chaereas and Callirhoe, torn apart when she is kidnapped and sold as a slave, while 'Daphnis and Chloe' tells of a boy and girl abandoned at birth, who grow up to fall in love and battle pirates.
Charles Dickens is the acclaimed definitive biography of Britain s greatest novelist by bestselling author Claire Tomalin, author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self and Jane Austen: A Life Powerful and remarkable.
'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely.
Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian.
With sly sophistication and ebullient charm, Lila Azam Zanganeh shares the intoxication of delirious joy to be found in reading - in particular, in reading the masterpieces of 'the great writer of happiness' Vladimir Nabokov.
Jane Austen is the definitive biography of one of Britain's best-loved novelists, from the acclaimed author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman'As near perfect a life of Austen as we are likely to get: intelligent, feeling, suggestive' Carmen Callil, Daily Telegraph'Tomalin has written a biography that reflects Austen's own exacting standards, a book that radiates intelligence, wit and insight' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times'Of all the Austen biographies, this is the best .
Discover the fascinating autobiography of Dick Francis, one of the greatest jockeys and thriller writers of all timeDick Francis was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys.
A far-ranging, invigorating and irrepressible collection of essays on literature, cinema, art - and everything in between - from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Feel Free and Swing Time'Alarmingly good' Metro'Striding with open hearted zest and eloquence between fiction (from EM Forster to David Foster Wallace) and travel, movies and comedy, family and community in a self-portrait that charts the evolution of a formidable talent' Independent'Supremely good.
Kathleen Parkinson places this brilliant and bitter satire on the moral failure of the Jazz Age firmly in the context of Scott Fitzgerald's life and times.
Including Down and Out in Paris and London'Orwell was the great moral force of his age' SpectatorThe powerful writings collected together in this volume chronicle George Orwell's first-hand experiences of life among the underclass of the 'two nations' of rich and poor.
Including The Road to Wigan Pier'No one wrote better about the English character than Orwell' New York Review of BooksMuch of George Orwell's best writing, brought together in this collection, is concerned with his complex, often contradictory attitude to England.
Including Animal Farm'Orwell is the most influential political writer of the twentieth century' New York Review of BooksThroughout his life George Orwell aimed, in his words, to make 'political writing into an art'.
'Buttonholes the reader with its informality, its unhurried rhythms, deadpan humour and acerbic remarks'Frances Spalding, Sunday TimesFor Gertrude Stein and her wife Alice B.
The first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist, which was almost single-handedly responsible for creating the Bront myth A classic in its own right, still read today as one of the great works of Victorian literature Lucasta MillerElizabeth Gaskell s biography of her close friend Charlotte Bront was published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the sub-title An Autobiography .