Literary Figures

Flamboyant and witty, Oscar Wilde was famous for being famous. The toast of late-nineteenth London society, he once boasted he could speak spontaneously on any subject, and his writings were as varied as his captivating conversation. One of the leading...

Featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman! "J. Michael Straczynski is, without question, one of the greatest science fiction minds of our time." -- Max Brooks (World War Z) For four decades, J. Michael Straczynski has been one of the most...

Patrick Deeley's train journey home to rural East Galway in autumn 1978 was a pilgrimage of grief: his giant of a father had been felled, the hurley-making workshop silenced. From this moment, Patrick unfolds his childhood as a series of evocative...

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while...

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's. Vera Slonim shared his delight at the enchantment of life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and...

'Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously' JILLY COOPER Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April...

'The moment I got my job at Virago in 1978 I knew it would be a long time before I would leave. I certainly wouldn't have had the brazen hope then-only twenty-five and very recently new to Britain-that I would ever become the Publisher, but I did know...

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of...

"A year in Paris"...Countless American students have been lured by that vision - and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. "Dreaming in French" tells three stories of that experience and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780061665431Author Professor Gay TaleseFormat PaperbackPage Count 608Imprint HarperCollins PublishersPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781914198373Author Amina CainFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Daunt BooksPublisher Daunt Books

From the bestselling author of The Dutch House, Commonwealth and Bel Canto, Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award. When Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college they began a friendship that would define their...

Ruskin is one of the most influential and exhilarating writers in English. Art critic, architectural visionary, social reformer, climate warner and incomparable teacher; Ruskin's words not only transformed Victorian England but speak to us with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780940322127Author J.R. AckerleyFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

Novelist, playwright, film actor, martial artist, and political commentator, Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was arguably the most famous person in Japan at the time of his death. Henry Scott Stokes, one of Mishima's closest friends, was the only non-Japanese...

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Here, at last, is the astonishing sequel to Alan Bennett's classic Writing Home, updated for paperback. Untold Stories contains significant previously unpublished work, including a poignant memoir of his family and of growing up in Leeds, together with...

Here, at last, is the astonishing sequel to Alan Bennett's classic Writing Home, updated for paperback. Untold Stories contains significant previously unpublished work, including a poignant memoir of his family and of growing up in Leeds, together with...

"I'm so glad that a new edition is coming! A wonderful, inspirational and essential book for Christie-lovers." Lucy Worsley, author of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton, 2022) 'My dear home, my nest, my house': these words from...

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life,...

"Research reveals the rich and varied cultural and intellectual experiences available to an eager young Thomas Stearns Eliot during the year he spent in Paris: Wagnerian opera, the Ballets Russes, music of Stravinsky and Beethoven, Bergson's...

'I have read all W. Scott's novels at least fifty times,' wrote Byron. '...grand work. Scotch Fielding, as well as great English poet - wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.' A. N. Wilson's subtle, entertaining and frequently provocative...

Beatrix Potter is one of the world's bestselling, most cherished authors, whose books have enchanted generations of children for over a hundred years. Yet how she achieved this legendary status is just one of several stories of Beatrix Potter's...

Beatrix Potter is one of the world's bestselling, most cherished authors, whose books have enchanted generations of children for over a hundred years. Yet how she achieved this legendary status is just one of several stories of Beatrix Potter's...

February 1, 2002 marks the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes. To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American...

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in...

The enormous popular appeal of Philip Larkin's poetry has long been established; but oddly little is known to his admiring public about the personality behind the work.The Selected Letters will change this, throwing light on a more complex, and in many...

'The master storyteller of our times' Hillary Rodham Clinton'The whole story of his truly astonishing life' Bob Woodward'The book was damn near addictive. I loved it' Ron Howard'At times his poignant narrative will bring you to tears' Patricia Cornwell'A...

Hemingway's captivating memoir of living in Paris during the twenties.'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast'Hemingway's memories of...

Discover one of the best cities in the world through the lens of some of the most iconic writers who have ever lived. London has long inspired and celebrated books and writing, and some of the most well-known and beloved names in English Literature have...

Few would question that Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, playwright, philosopher and journalist, is a major cultural icon. His widely quoted works have led to countless movie adaptions, graphic novels, pop songs, and even t-shirts. In this Very...

The revealing of T. S. Eliot's hidden muse - Emily Hale, the Hyacinth Girl of the famous The Waste Land poem'Extraordinary... A rare work of sympathy and insight' Colm Toibin'Gordon sifts through the documents with her customary care and delicacy'...

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1919, George Weidenfeld fled to England in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime. There he began a career in publishing that would make him one of the most influential figures in the industry. Over the course of his long...

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston includes Sherston's Progress and both Memoirs,About the AuthorSiegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to...

In the 1970s, the West Coast feminist art movement coalesced around the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, founded by artist Judy Chicago. Arriving as a young art student in 1976, Terry Wolverton stayed on to become a teacher and co-founder of the Lesbian...

'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156260251Author Anais NinFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint Mariner Books ClassicsPublisher Mariner Books Classics

For fifteen years, after his first visit to the country in1876, Nietzsche was repeatedly and irresistibly drawn back to Italy's climate and lifestyle. It was there that he composed his most famous works, including Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ecce Homo. ...

In Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working-class Jewish childhood in the East End of London: a small cluster of streets right next to the city, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity...

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA. 'Miss du Maurier creates on the grand scale . . . observation, sympathy, courage, a sense of the romantic, are here' OBSERVER 'It is my pick of the Spring biographical material for sheer entertainment value . . . a...