Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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W J McCormack

In June 1934, W. B. Yeats gratefully received the award of a Goethe-Plakette from Oberburgermeister Krebs, four months after his early play The Countess Cathleen had been produced in Frankfurt by SS Untersturmfuhrer Bethge. Four years later, the poet publicly commended Nazi legislation before leaving Dublin to die in southern France. These hitherto neglected, isolated and scandalous details stand at the heart of this reflective study of Yeats's life, his attitudes towards death, and his politics. 
 
Blood Kindred identifies an obsession with family as the link connecting Yeats's late engagement with fascism to his Irish Victorian origins in suburban Dublin and industrializing Ulster. It carefully documents and analyses his involvement with both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult, his secretive consultations with Irish army officers during his Senate years, his incidental anti-Semitism, and his approval of the right-wing royalist group L'Action Française in the 1920s. 
 
The familiar peaks and troughs of Irish history, such as the 1916 Rising and the death of Parnell, are re-oriented within a radical new interpretation of Yeats's life and thought, his poetry and plays. As far as possible Bill McCormack lets Yeats speak for himself through generous quotation from his newly accessible correspondence. The result is a combative, entertaining biography which allows Ireland's greatest literary figure to be seen in the round for the first time.

Blood Kindred

W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics

Victoria Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother. But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field.

Trollope

Angela Bourke

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War II. Maeve wrote fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when William Shawn invited her to join The New Yorker. Tiny, impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being invented'. Her richly textured fiction criticism and 'Talk of the Town' pieces, published in the 1950s and '60s, during The New Yorker's most influential period, offer unsparing portraits of the Ireland she had left and the America she inhabited. As this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her memory of home and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America make her an icon of the twentieth century.

Maeve Brennan

Wit, Style and Tragedy: An Irish Writer in New York

William Graves

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. 
 
Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years. 
 
Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his 'Muses', and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

Wild Olives

Life in Majorca With Robert Graves

Elspeth Huxley

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. Her family and friends, their home and their travels, the glorious wildlife and scenery, described in rich and loving detail, all spring to life in this enchanting book. 'She knows East Africa and she loves it. . . with a critical and understanding sympathy. ' The Times 'What a marvellous writer. . . and what a Kenya it was. ' Financial Times

The Mottled Lizard

Nicholas Roe

Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism. The man Virginia Woolf called the 'spiritual grandfather' of the modern world was descended from black Caribbeans and grew up a child of the American and French revolutions. A poet and radical journalist, he threw off the shackles of the old order and campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. Unwilling to see the Prince of Wales as an 'Adonis of Loveliness', Hunt was jailed for 'diabolical libel' that presented the prince as he was: a corpulent fifty-year-old, sodden with drink and drugs. 
 
Hunt was the centre of a charismatic generation. In prison, he drew the homage of Lord Byron, and soon afterwards discovered the Romantic geniuses Keats and Shelley. He was also a man riven by contradicitons, enjoying a controversial public role while battling with private demons. Hunt's own poetry glows with the sexual frankness that characterised all his relationships, male and female. 
 
Written with flair and brilliant imaginative insight, and using a wealth of unpublished manuscript sources, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt overturns existing accounts and presents a sparkling new portrait of Leigh Hunt and the English Romantics.

Fiery Heart

The First Life of Leigh Hunt

James Wood

In a series of long essays, James Wood examines the connection between literature and religious belief, in a startlingly wide group of writers. Wood re-appraises the writing of such figures as Thomas More, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Anton Chekhov, Thomas Mann, Nikolai Gogol, Gustave Flaubert and Virginia Woolf, vigorously reading them against the grain of received opinion, and illuminatingly relating them to questions of religious and phiosophical belief. 
 
Contemporary writers, such as Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon and George Steiner, are also discussed, with the boldness and attention to language that have made Wood such an influential and controversial figure. Writing here about his own childhood struggle to believe, Wood says that 'the child of evangelism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference'. Wood brings that suspicion to bear on literature itself. The result is a unique book of criticism.

The Broken Estate

Essays on Literature and Belief

Norman Sherry

Unquestionably one of the greatest novelists of his time, Graham Greene had always guarded his privacy, remaining aloof, mysterious and unpredictable.  Nonetheless, he took the surprising step of allowing Norman Sherry complete access to letter and diaries, and gave his consent to this full and frank biography in three volumes - the first of which takes Greene's life up to the beginning of the Second World War when he published some of his most remarkable work, including Journey Without Maps (1935), England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), Brighton Rock (1938) and The Confidential Agent (1939). At the heart of the story lies a remarkable series of letters Greene wrote to his wife, Vivien, for whose sake he became a Catholic.  They show us an unknown, younger Greene, impassioned and romantic.  Sherry also recounts in fascinating detail how Greene struggled to turn himself into a novelist and learn his craft, and follows his subject's pre-war footsteps to West Africa and Mexico, where he was able to penetrate far into the strange and alarming territory that Greene has made his own.  The book that emerges is without doubt one of the most revealing literary biographies of the decade.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume 1

1904-1939

Valerie Grove

Frank and funny, unorthodox, liberated and quintessentially English, Dodie Smith, playwright and novelist, was the author of those immortal classics, The Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle. One of the most successful dramatists of her generation, she spent the war years in America, befriended Christopher Isherwood and, through Walt Disney's film, became a household name.

Dear Dodie

The Life of Dodie Smith

Hermione Lee

The name 'Edith Wharton' conjures up 'Gilded Age' New York, in all its snobbery and ruthlessness - the world of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. But this definitive biography by Hermione Lee overturns the stereotype. This Edith Wharton is not the genteel, nostalgic chronicler of a vanished age but a fiercely modern woman, writing of sex and incest, love and war - a woman of passionate conviction and conflicting ambitions and desires. 
 
Born in 1862 during the Civil War, Wharton broke away from her wealthy background. She travelled adventurously in Europe, eventually settling in Paris: during the First World War she committed herself to war-work, and lived in France, her 'second country' until her death in 1937. She created fabulous homes in New England and in France, and her life was filled with remarkable friends, including Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She ran her professional life with fierce energy, but she also had her secrets, including a passionate mid-life love-affair, recorded in a coded diary. She was unhappily married, childless, and divorced, and knew loneliness and anguish. Her brilliant, disturbing fiction shows her deep understanding of the longing and struggle in women's lives. 
 
This masterly new biography draws on new material and delves into every aspect of Wharton's extraordinary life-story. It shifts the emphasis towards Europe, placing her in her social context and her history. In particular, it shows in fascinating detail how she worked and what lies at the heart of her magnificent and subtle books.

Edith Wharton

Harry Ricketts

The stories of Rudyard Kipling are read all over the world, by people of all ages, yet no biography has fully explored the complex link between his fascinating life and his writing; untill this one. Harry Ricketts brings Kipling vividly and touchingly to life - his traumatic childhood, split between India and England (haunting the powerful Jungle Books); his youth as a reporter in India, troubled by love and politics; his entry into London literary life and his often hilarious travels in America. Ricketts explores Kiplings's imperialism and radicaism, and traces his increasing reclusiveness after his son's death in the First World War. The dramatic life is backed by subtle readings of the works , from the BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS to KIM and STALKY AND CO. With its strong narrative drive, this biography entrals and moves, while shining a strong new light on a great writer.

The Unforgiving Minute

A Life of Rudyard Kipling

Quentin Bell

As the nephew of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell enjoyed an initimacy with his subject granted to few biographers. Originally published in two volumes in 1972, his acclaimed biography describes Virginia Woolf's family and childhood; her earliest writings; the formation of the Bloomsbury Group; her marriage to Leonard Woolf; the mental breakdown of the years 1912-15; the origins and growth of the Hogarth Press; her friendships with T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and Vita Sackvill-West; her struggles to write The Waves and The Years; and the political and personal distresses of her last decade. 
 
Compelling, moving and entertaining, Quentin Bell's biography was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. It is a fitting tribute to a remarkable and complex woman, one of the greatest writers of the century.

Virginia Woolf

A Biography

Jeremy Lewis

`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed the litarary world of its social smartness and any worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review. Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romatic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, abd his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.

Cyril Connolly

A Life

Jon Stallworthy

Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today – this is the comprehensive literary biography of the greatest WW1 poet 
 
Wilfred Owen tragically died in battle just a few days before the Armistice. Now, during the centenary year of his death, this biography honours Owen’s brief yet remarkable life, and the enduring legacy he left. Stallworthy covers his life from the childhood spent in the backstreets of Shrewsbury to the appalling final months in the trenches. More than a simple account of his life, it is also a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind. 
This revised edition contains the beautiful illustrations of the original edition, including the drawings by Owen and facsimile manuscripts of his greatest poems, as well as a new preface by the author. 
 
‘One of the finest biographies of our time.’ Graham Greene 
 
‘An outstanding book, a worthy memorial to its subject.’ Kingsley Amis 
 
‘As lovingly detailed as the records of Owen's short life permit, but it is always fascinatingly readable, in fact engrossing.’ Sunday Telegraph

Wilfred Owen

Stacy Schiff

A fascinating account of the life of one of the century's great eccentrics - the brilliant Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Born in 1900 of impoverished aristocracy, he swiftly developed a mania for aviation, despite his chaotic mind and total technological incompetence. He flew reconnaissance missions in the War and wrote some strange and wonderful books, including the classic children's story THE LITTLE PRINCE, between theatrically executed airplane crashed. He died in the air in 1944, and his brief life instantly acquired mythical status. 'Every facet of Saint-Exupery's short and dramatic life is covered in this fascinating biography. This is Stacy Schiff's first book, but she writes with all the skill, assurance and mastery of an old literary hand. If there was such a thing as a prize for a first biography, I would nominate this book. ' Frank McLynn, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.

Saint-Exupery

Hugh Brogan

For a man who longed for a quiet existence, Arthur Ransome led a remarkably adventurous life. His bohemian years as a writer in Chelsea before the First World War closed with the agony of his prosecution for Libel by Lord Alfred Douglas. His two marriages - first to an unstable fantasist and later to a formidable Russian who had been Trotsky's secretary - were, to say the least, stormy. As a journalist he had a ringside view of the Russian Revolution and travelled widely in the Middle East and China. It was not until he was 45 and settled in the Lake District that he embarked, in the Swallows and Amazons stories, on some of the best loved books ever written for children.

The Life Of Arthur Ransome

Susie Harries

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. 
 
Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind.Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. 
 
He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art, architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing, conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians, Zeitgeist, Englishness and how a nation's character may, or must, be reflected in its art. His life - as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.

Nikolaus Pevsner

The Life

Henrietta Garnett

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the author of Vanity Fair and step-aunt of Virginia Woolf, was also a fine writer. Based on new and original research, this enchanting and evocative memoir paints the world of Anny's intricate web of relations and friends: children's parties with the Dickens family, holidays with Julia Margaret Cameron and the Tennysons, intimate scenes with Browning in Rome and Ruskin on Lake Coniston. 
 
In addition we read about Anny's own inner life: her near-obsession with her father: William Makepeace Thackeray, her escape into writing, her startling marriage to her second cousin and her godson, and the story of her sister Minny's passionate marriage to Leslie Stephen. We also learn of Stephen's second wife, Julia Jackson, mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. 
 
Meticulously researched, this intimate story draws not only on a wealth of letters, journals, hitherto unpublished sketches and photographs, but also on family legends passed down to the author through four generations. Illuminating, comic and touching, Anny reads like a novel, presenting a unique portrait of the rich literary world that formed the bridge between the Victorians and Bloomsbury.

Anny

A Life of Anny Thackeray Ritchie

Robert Crawford

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves and struggles of the great poet. 
 
With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible élan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive, intelligent biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compels the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

The Bard

Michael Bakewell

Melissa Bakewell

Augusta Leigh was the child of one of the most sensational scandals to hit Georgian England - the seduction of the wilful and beautiful Marchioness of Carmarthen by 'Mad Jack' Byron - and scandal, of one kind or another, was to pursue Augusta for the rest of her life and even beyond the grave. 
 
Her marriage to her cousin, equerry and companion of the Prince of Wales, Colonel George Leigh, who fell from grace when it came to light that he had cheated the Prince over the sale of a horse and fiddled regimental accounts to fund his gambling habit, brought her nothing but poverty and seven children. Her love affair with her half-brother, Lord Byron, was largely responsible for his separation from his wife and his subsequent exile. Lady Byron, determined that Augusta's incestuous liaison should not go unpunished, waged a relentless war of attrition against her, in which Augusta's daughter, Elizabeth Medora, also became entangled. 
 
This is the first biography of Augusta Leigh for over thirty years, and draws on a wealth of new material from archives all over the country. It sheds new light not only on this remarkable and courageous woman, but on Georgian and Regency society and the life of the Court.

Augusta Leigh

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Wilfred Owen when both were in hospital, on to the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the Great War began. 
 
Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. We follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry. 
 
We come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. We get a fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

Strange Meetings

The Lives of the Poets of the Great War

Neil Powell

The poet George Crabbe (1754 - 1832), best known as the author of Peter Grimes and The Village, was also a surgeon, a clergyman, a botanist, and a novelist. An ambitious, resourceful, self-made professional man, he devoted his middle years to his children and his increasingly ill wife, after whose death he embarked, at 60, on an astonishing second life. 
 
This new biography charts, for the first time, Crabbe's progress from an impoverished, provincial childhood in coastal Suffolk to late eighteenth-century London, where he witnessed the Gordon Riots and acquired Edmund Burke as patron; through his eventful career as a ducal chaplain and county parson whose addictions included natural history, theatre-going, and opium; and so on to his final years when, as a rector in Wiltshire, he travelled widely, met major literary figures such as Scott and Wordsworth, and fell in love with some remarkable young women. 
 
Neil Powell provides a compelling portrait of a uniquely gifted poet - a man of low-key and unsentimental vision who lived a quintessentially English life.

George Crabbe

An English Life

Michael Holroyd

Lytton Strachey, genius, wit, iconoclast, biographer, pacifist, and homosexual campaigner, was at the nexus of the literary and artistic life of Bloomsbury. In the 1960s he was seen as a progenitor of the hippy cult. Now he appears as a far more subversive and challenging figure. He revolutionised the writing of biography and smuggled deviant sexual behaviour into our history in his reassessment of Elizabethan and Victorian times. For this re-telling of his story Holroyd has had access to published and unpublished material unavailable in the 1960s when his biography of Strachey first appeared. In many of Bloomsbury's three-cornered relationships, he had only two sides of the triangle. Now he has all three, and in a new social and political climate can tell the full story of this extraordinary world with candour, sympathy and sexual explicitness. He has cut 100, 000 words, revised much of the text and added a wealth of new material, about Strachey himself, about Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Rupert Brooke and most vividly about the tragic life of Strachey's companion Dora Carrington.

Lytton Strachey

The New Biography

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