Literary Figures

'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...

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. It is not only a classic avowal of a professional...

'One of the greatest writers of our time.' Toni Morrison 'You Don't Know Us Negroes adds immeasurably to our understanding of Hurston ... her words make it impossible for readers to consider her anything but one of...

Catherine Cookson is known and loved for her vibrant and earthy novels set in and around the North-East of England, past and present. Her autobiography makes plain how it is she knows her background and her characters so well.The Our Kate of the title is...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

Aristocrat, literary celebrity, 'Rose Queen', devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast - Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is re-told here in a dazzling new biography. Vita Sackville-West was a...

The extraordinary life of one of the world's greatest music and literary icons, in the words of those who knew him best.Poet, novelist, singer-songwriter, artist, prophet, icon-there has never been a figure like Leonard Cohen. He was a true giant in...

Theodore Dreiser's Russian Diary is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He...

Patricia Highsmith - author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY - had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private...

The extraordinary and dramatic biography of the first modern feminist, who spent her entire life fighting for the principle of equality 'Gripping ... Most lives would be overshadowed by such a melodramatic end. But Marx's life was so much more than a...

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Toibin looks at the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodovar,...

From one of India's finest writers, thinkers and commentators, a memoir of a love affair with cricket. As a fan, player, writer, scholar, controversialist and administrator, Ram Guha has spent a life with cricket. In this book, Guha...

**WINNER of the 2019 PEN Ackerley Prize**'A major literary talent . . . speaks about the power and powerlessness that young women are subject to in a wholly fresh, clear-eyed way . . . you'll find it hard to come away from The Terrible without a stab of...

In the first authorized biography of W. B. Yeats for over 50 years, Roy Foster brings new light to one of the most complex and fascinating lives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Working from a great archive of personal and contemporary...

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. 'Coleridge: Early Visions' is the first part of Holmes's...

One of the most brilliant writers of her day, George Eliot (1819-1880) was also one of the most talked about. Intellectual and independent, she had the strength to defy polite society with her highly unorthodox private life, so why did she deny her...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780061430800Author Francine ProseFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 263gDimensions(mm) 199mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780345327390Author Marion DaviesFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint FawcettPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 215gDimensions(mm) 172mm * 106mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781958972106Author Elizabeth CunninghamFormat PaperbackPage Count 260Imprint Monkfish Book Publishing CompanyPublisher Monkfish Book Publishing Company

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought...

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798-1803) and as the sister of the poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality...

This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924--a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which...

The first English language biographer to have returned to the original Danish sources, Wullshlager creates a fascinating picture of Andersen as a deeply troubled man, as far from Danny Kaye's all-singing version as it is possible to imagine. Desperately...

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper PrizeWinner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year AwardShortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize Let me take you down...

A page-turning account of the scandal that almost ruined Dickens and how the story disappeared from history Charles Dickens was regarded as the great proponent of hearth and home in Victorian Britain, but in 1858 this image was nearly shattered. With...

Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, traveller and heiress; she was also bisexual and a rebel. She became the lover of Vita Sackville-West, wrecking her marriage to the Duke of Wellington. She was the intimate friend of W.B. Yeats in his final years...

Few artists have captured the emotional, sexual, and political chaos of modern urban life as perceptively as David Wojnarowicz, whom Out magazine has called "an acute observer of the unmapped region surrounding his heart and one of the best writers...

John Cheever's journals reveal the inner life of this remarkable writer and the contradictions that drove him. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he hated himself for his drinking, but for...

Emily Eden was born in 1797 into the charmed inner circle of the English upper class who conducted the country's political life. In 1836 this prominent member of Whig society joined her brother George in India where he was Governor-General. She stayed...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781770414464Author Jean McNeilFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint ECW Press,CanadaPublisher ECW Press,Canada

Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge transforms our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' forever. Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of these...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDThis is the secret history of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.Wonderland is part of our cultural heritage. But beneath the fairy tale lies the complex history of the author and his subject. Charles Dodgson...

From the birth of crime writing with Wilkie Collins and Dostoevsky, through Conan Doyle to the golden age of crime, with the rise of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, P. D. James brings a lifetime of reading and writing crime fiction to...

In this funny, poignant and unflinchingly honest memoir, one of the world's best-loved storytellers explains how he evolved from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels inspired millions to claim their own lives. It...

After The Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz was exiled for many years from his home country of Poland. In Native Realm, he evokes that homeland and his years away from it; how it nurtured him and how its divisions and destruction shaped a generation...

Cardinal Manning * Florence Nightingale * Thomas Arnold * General Gordon Lytton Strachey's biographical essays on four 'eminent Victorians' dropped a depth-charge on Victorian England when the book was published in 1918. It ushered in the modern...

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionLonglisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing'If you have even the slightest interest in Orwell or in the development of our culture, you should not miss this engrossing, enlightening book.'...

Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and adored grandfather. Tormented as a young student in a right-wing, catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home aged fifteen. At...

Anne Bronte, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Bronte sisters, remains a best-selling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels - Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - and her poetry belies the quiet, yet...

Something extraordinary happened to the UK literary scene in the 1980s. In the space of eight years, a generation of young British writers took the literary novel into new realms of setting, subject matter and style, challenging - and almost eclipsing -...