Clive Ponting

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Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Clive Ponting's book studies the relationship between the environment and human history. It examines world civilisations from Sumeria to ancient Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earth's resources, only to expand to the point where those resources could no longer sustain the societies' populations and cause subsequent collapse. 
 
This new edition of Clive Ponting's international bestseller has been revised, expanded and updated. It provides not only a compelling story of how we have damaged the environment for thousands of years but also an up-to-the-minute assessment of the crisis facing the world today - and the problems that have to be addressed in the search for solutions.

A New Green History Of The World

The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

Adrian Tinniswood

From the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values. 
 
'Preposterously entertaining' Observer 
'Brilliant' Daily Telegraph 
'Rollicking' Sunday Times 
 
As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. 
 
Yet - perhaps surprisingly - many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, Noble Ambitions takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power. 
 
* A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year * 
* Longlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History *

Noble Ambitions

The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House

Tim Thornton

By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things: 
1. Grow up 
2. Quit idolising rock stars 
3. Move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17. 
 
Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. But that's about to change. 
 
One unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies ('the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom' Rolling Stone). Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol and grab the scoop of a lifetime - why did Webster burn out? The ensuing chaos forces both men to revisit the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the nineties; to quote Lance Webster himself, 'before Britpop came along and fucked everything up'...

The Alternative Hero

Peter Moore

The brutal murder of the Reverend George Parker in the rural village of Oddingley on Midsummer's Day in 1806 - shot and beaten to death, his body set on fire and left smouldering in his own glebe field - gripped everyone from the Home Secretary in London to newspapermen across the country. It was a strange and stubborn case. The investigation lasted twenty-four years and involved inquests, judges and coroners, each more determined than the last to solve Oddingley's most gruesome crime - or crimes, as it turned out. 
 
With a cast of characters straight out of Hardy, Damn His Blood is a nail-biting true story of brutality, greed and ruthlessness which brings an elusive society vividly back to life.

Damn His Blood

Being a True and Detailed History of the Most Barbarous and Inhumane Murder at Oddingley and the Quick and Awful Retribution

Clive Stafford Smith

'[A] vivid, inquiring memoir... A properly soul-searching book' Observer 
 
The powerful and emotive memoir about one man’s relationship with his father and the stigma around mental illness, from the acclaimed author and human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. 
 
A leading campaigner for justice, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has spent a lifetime getting to know his clients – from detainees in Guantánamo Bay to prisoners facing execution on Death Row – and finding out 'what makes them tick'. 
 
Yet closer to home, there was a man whose mind has always remained off limits: his own father. 
 
But when Clive inherited more than 3,000 of his letters, he could finally start to piece together the obsessive personality behind them. 
 
Drawing on the life of a client with his own mental health issues, The Far Side of the Moon is an unforgettable memoir and a meticulous critique of our social and justice systems.Just how much has Clive's father's unspoken struggle shaped his own life? 
 
PRAISE FOR CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH 
 
‘Superbly written’ John Grisham on Injustice 
 
‘Remarkable’ Observer 
 
‘An empowering read for anyone who cares about the human implementation of justice’ Colin Firth on Injustice

The Far Side of the Moon

Trials of My Father

Shortlisted for the 2013 Orwell Prize. 
THE STORY CONTINUES: TWO NEW CHAPTERS FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION 
 
In 1986, Kris Maharaj, a British businessman living in Miami, was arrested for the brutal murder of two ex-business associates. His lawyer did not present a strong alibi; Kris was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. 
 
It wasn't until a young lawyer working for nothing, Clive Stafford Smith, took on his case that strong evidence began to emerge that the state of Florida had got the wrong man on Death Row. So far, so good - except that, as Stafford Smith argues here so compellingly, the American justice system is actually designed to ignore innocence. Twenty-six years later, Maharaj is still in jail. 
 
Step by step, Stafford Smith untangles the Maharaj case and the system that makes disasters like this inevitable. His conclusions will act as a wake-up call for those who condone legislation which threatens basic human rights and, at the same time, the personal story he tells demonstrates that determination can challenge the institutions that surreptitiously threaten our freedom.

Injustice

Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America

Michael Holroyd

Henry Irving - a merchant's clerk who became the saviour of British theatre - and Ellen Terry, who made her first theatre appearance as soon as she could walk, were the king and queen of the Victorian stage. Creatively interdependent, they founded a power-house of arts at the Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker as business manager, where they recast Shakespeare's plays on an epic scale and took the company on lucrative and exhilarating international tours. 
 
In his masterly new biography, award-winning writer Michael Holroyd explores their public and private lives, showing how their artistic legacy and their brilliant but troubled children came to influence the modern world.

A Strange Eventful History

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families

Margaret Forster

‘I was born on 25th May, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’ 
 
So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home of today. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.

My Life in Houses

Andrew Pontzen

**AS SEEN ON BBC BREAKFAST** 
 
Will we ever truly understand our cosmic home? This is the story of the technologies that allow us to look up, to learn and to discover our place in the cosmos. 
 
'An electrifying new history of the universe' 
HANNAH FRY, author of Rutherford and Fry's Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything 
 
We are part of an incredible chain of events stretching 13.8 billion years into the past and even further into the future. But what does that future hold? And how do scientists study the entire universe? 
 
The Universe in a Box is Andrew Pontzen's tribute to simulations - the remarkable computer codes that, over the last century, have allowed us to grasp the distant past and far future of the universe. It reveals the stories of pioneering scientists who unlocked the mysteries of the cosmos, and reframes our understanding of galaxies, black holes and space itself. 
 
'I was enlightened, amazed, and profoundly impressed' 
SIR PHILIP PULLMAN, author of His Dark Materials 
 
'Compelling...a veritable treasure chest filled with captivating stories' 
SCIENCE

The Universe in a Box

A New Cosmic History

Joseph O'Connor

At college in 1980s Luton, Robbie Goulding, an Irish-born teenager, meets the elusive Fran Mulvey, an orphaned Vietnamese refugee. Together they form a band. Joined by cellist Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock and her twin brother Seán on drums, The Ships in the Night set out to chase fame. But the story of this makeshift family is haunted by ghosts from the past. 
 
Spanning 25 years, The Thrill of it All rewinds and fast-forwards through an evocative soundtrack of struggle and laughter. Infused with blues, ska, classic showtunes, New Wave and punk, using interviews, lyrics, memoirs and diaries, the tale stretches from suburban England to Manhattan’s East Village, from Thatcher-era London to the Hollywood Bowl, from the meadows of the Glastonbury Festival to a wintry Long Island, culminating in a Dublin evening in July 2012, a night that changes everything. 
 
A story of loyalties, friendship, the call of the muse, and the beguiling shimmer of teenage dreams, this is a warm-hearted, funny and deeply moving novel for anyone that’s ever loved a song.

The Thrill of it All

Nicholas Hytner

The Sunday Times Bestseller 
 
This is the inside story of twelve years at the helm of Britain’s greatest theatre. 
 
It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes such as The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors; of opening the doors of the National Theatre to a broader audience than ever before, and changing the public’s perception of what theatre is for. It is about probing Shakespeare from every angle and reinventing the classics. About fostering new talent and directing some of the most celebrated actors of our times. Its cast includes the likes of Alan Bennett, Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren. 
 
Intimate, candid and insightful, Balancing Acts is a passionate exploration of the art and alchemy of making theatre.

Balancing Acts

Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre

Judith Cook

Simon Forman was one of the most extraordinary personalities of Elizabethan and Jacobean London. 
Charismatic, volatile and ambitious, he was doctor to the giants of the theatre and his 'playbook' contains the first eye-witness accounts of Shakespeare's plays. Like most doctors he was also an astrologer, reading the stars for all and sundry. 
 
Constantly on the fringes of great events and court intrigues, his name has been linked with Sir Walter Raleigh's mysterious group, 'the School of Night' and with the notorious Overbury poisoning case, in which the beautiful Countess of Essex was accused of murder. 
 
Also uncovered is Forman's private world, that of a compulsive womaniser who kept a coded diary, never fully deciphered before, a record of promiscuity as colourful as the journals of Pepys and Boswell.

Dr Simon Forman

John Heilpern

John Osborne (1929-1994), unapologetic rebel and original Angry Young Man, changed the face of modern British theatre forever with Look Back in Anger. An actor turned playwright, Osborne was married five times, his private life generating a tumult and drama to match that of his work. 
 
This startlightly candid, authorised but intimate and informal biography is the first to have access to Osborne's own notebooks and private letters, which record for posterity his often anguished nature. It includes personal interviews with scores of his friends and enemies, among them a bombshell of a confession from Osborne's alleged male lover, and the first public comments from his estranged daughter Nolan, who was thrown out of the family home at just sixteen. 
 
This is an essential, unorthodox, moving and extraordinarily frank portrait of the man, the playwright and his era.

John Osborne

A Patriot for Us

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. 
 
In this extraordinary saga, Adrian Tinniswood draws on tens of thousands of letters, which survived by chance in an attic, to reveal the remarkable world of the Verneys, a family of Buckinghamshire gentry in the seventeenth century. 
 
Here is Edmund Verney, Charles I's standard bearer at Edgehill, who died still clutching the King's standard, and his children: Ralph, whose support of the Parliamentarian cause during the Civil War forced him into exile; Mun, a professional soldier who survived Cromwell's attack on Drogheda in 1649, only to be stabbed to death two days later; Mall, who fell pregnant out of wedlock, and Bess, who ran off with a clergyman. There was also Henry, who was obsessed with horse-racing; Cary, who gambled away a fortune, and Tom, a devout Christian and a petty crook. 
 
The next generation led equally exciting lives. Ralph's son Jack went to Syria and made a fortune. Cousin Pen stayed at home and slept with her sister's fiancé. Cousin Dick was hanged at Tyburn. Jack's brother Edmund married a girl who was rich, beautiful and deeply in love with him and within months of the marriage, she lost her mind. 
 
The Verneys is narrative history at its very best - fascinating, surprising, enthralling.

The Verneys

Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England

Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean- a 'strange and beautiful place', as he described it in the last interview before his death, 'rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape, a heart- shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England... with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me.' It was a childhood which informed all his television work, from his first documentary to such classic dramas as The Singing Detective. 
 
The Changing Forest, first published in 1962, is Potter's deeply personal study of that small area- its people, traditions, ceremonies and institutions- at a time of profound cultural and social change in the late 1950s and early '60s. With extraordinary precision and feeling he describes the fabric of a world whose old ways are yielding to the new: habits altering; expectations growing; work, leisure, language itself changing under the impact of the new television, of commercial jingles and the early Elvis. And, with powerful sympathy and wit, he asks whether the gains of modernity have, for the individuals and society he so marvellously evokes, been worth the loss. 
 
Part autobiography of one of this century's greatest writers, part elegy for a vanishing way of life, part testament to the abiding humanity that underlies all Potter's work, this exquisite, passionate and brillinat book is a classic of its kind.

Changing Forest

Grayson Perry

Wendy Jones

Every inch of Grayson's childhood bedroom was covered with pictures of aeroplanes, and every surface with models. Fantasy took over his life, in a world of battles ruled by his teddy bear, Alan Measles. He grew up. And in 2003, an acclaimed ceramic artist, he accepted the Turner Prize as his alter-ego Clare, wearing his best dress, with a bow in his hair. 
 
Now he tells his own story, his voice beautifully caught by his friend, the writer Wendy Jones. Early childhood in Chelmsford, Essex is a rural Eden that ends abruptly with the arrival of his stepfather, leading to constant swerving between his parents' houses, and between boys' and women's clothes. But as Grayson enters art college and discovers the world of London squats and New Romanticism, he starts to find himself. At last he steps out as a potter and transvestite.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

Jeremy Lewis

Few newspaper editors are remembered beyond their lifetimes, but David Astor is a great exception to the rule. Growing up surrounded by astonishing wealth (the family home was so large it included a miniature railway to transport meals to the dining room) Astor’s early life was far from idyllic. At Oxford he suffered the first of the bouts of depression that were to blight his life, and he became a lost soul for much of the Thirties but when he took the Observer on in 1948 he converted a staid Sunday paper into essential reading. Employing the likes of Kim Philby, Vita Sackville-West, Clive James and Patrick O’Donovan (who became famous for writing his report on Bobby Kennedy’s funeral before it had taken place) he doubled the circulation and created a paper envied and admired.

David Astor

Daisy Hay

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize* 
 
In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. 
 
The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 
Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today. 
 
'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian 
 
'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

Ann Wroe

Although very little is known for certain about Pontius Pilate, the man who crucified Christ, this has not stopped writers in every age from imagining his life. In this extraordinary book, Ann Wroe recounts the lives of all our Pilates; among them the glittering medieval tyrant, devoted to gambling and getting around the law, and the wriggling modern pragmatist, whose dilemma over Jesus has been described by Tony Blair as 'a timeless parable of political life'. This is also the story of the man Pilate might have been; and the man who mirrors us. Ann Wroe shows how, in his struggles with fate and free will, Pilate's story has also become the story of ourselves.

Pilate

Joseph Hone

Longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 
 
'A remarkable achievement' Spectator 
 
In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of a London printer's workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and the promise of protection. 
 
Soon after, an anonymous pamphlet was quietly distributed in the backstreets of the city. Entitled The Memorial of the Church of England, the argument it proposed threatened to topple the government. Fearing insurrection, parliament was in turmoil and government minister Robert Harley launched a hunt for all of those involved. The printer was eventually named, but could not be found... 
 
In this breakneck political adventure, Joseph Hone shows us a nation in crisis through the story of a single incendiary document. 
 
'An elegant blend of scholarship and detection' Peter Moore, author of Endeavour 
'Enthralling' London Review of Books 
'An exciting story told with vigour' Adrian Tinniswood, Literary Review

The Paper Chase

The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers

Dora Carrington

Carrington's beguiling letters take us beyond the Bloomsbury group to discuss sexual mores, how to be an artist, and what it is to be truly oneself. 
 
Known only by her surname, Dora Carrington was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was friends with some of the greatest minds of her day, including Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann and Maynard Keynes. 
 
For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and - stricken without him- killed herself when he died in 1932. Though she never achieved the fame her early career promised, in her determination to live life according to her own nature – especially in relation to her work and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality – she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today. 
 
Now, through her passionate, playful and honest letters, we can encounter the maverick artist and compelling personality afresh and in her own words.

Carrington's Letters

Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships

Joe Stretch

Life in Manchester is sexy and stinking. Hold your breath. Justin wants a sex life, not a sex death. Rebecca has breasts but doesn't understand them. She needs to talk to Dostoevsky about erections, hairy armpits and firing squads. Life is difficult. Steve wants cash so he can enjoy his trendy body. He wants Carly too, but she just wants a never-ending orgasm. Johnny wants to be touched and, if possible, he'd like to seem happy. Colin wants to know why tits make his fists clench. 
 
This is their story. They try their best. They drag their feet through the fashions, the foul, the famous and the drunk of twenty-first century Britain. They're looking for happiness. What they find is friction.

Friction

Vesna Goldsworthy

'A piercingly evocative East-West love story' The Times 
 
 
This is a story of East and West. A story of love, betrayal, and lost illusions... 
 
The end of the Cold War seems unimaginable for Milena, a Red Princess trapped in a lifetime of limitless luxury. 
 
Yet when she meets Jason, a confident British poet, it's not long before she's secretly planning her escape to Britain. 
 
1980s London defies her privileged expectations. And when she discovers Jason's concept of freedom confronts her deepest-held beliefs, the very ideas of family and state come into question... 
 
 
'A wonderful, perfectly-pitched novel: full of delightful intrigue and wry insight about the human predicament and its unique tensions' William Boyd 
 
'Witty, poignant and full of surprises - every detail of this cross-cultural story of love and disillusionment rings true' Clare Chambers

Iron Curtain

A Love Story

Annalena McAfee

'Engrossing...I loved each and every brushstroke' Ian Rankin 
 
'Nightshade is a glorious novel... full of twisted sexuality, art and power' Observer 
 
Could the creative urge be the most destructive - even the deadliest - impulse of all? Could it end in death? 
 
Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now - forty years later - an artist herself. But she has sacrificed her career for her family. She resents the global success of her old college roommate. She is slowly unravelling. 
 
When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her comfortable life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover who seems to share her single-minded creative vision. 
 
 This timely novel explores sexual politics, asking if the true artist must relinquish the ordinary human need for love and connection to pave the way for desire and ambition, leading to a fatal awakening...

Nightshade

Howard Jacobson

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life. 
 
‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ 
 
With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship ... 
 
‘Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream’ Evening Standard 
 
'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

Shylock is My Name

The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

The Merchant of Venice, Retold

Ian Mortimer

The first biography of the rebel baron who deposed and murdered Edward II. 
 
One night in August 1323 a captive rebel baron, Sir Roger Mortimer, drugged his guards and escaped from the Tower of London. With the king's men-at-arms in pursuit he fled to the south coast, and sailed to France. There he was joined by Isabella, the Queen of England, who threw herself into his arms. A year later, as lovers, they returned with an invading army: King Edward II's forces crumbled before them, and Mortimer took power. He removed Edward II in the first deposition of a monarch in British history. Then the ex-king was apparently murdered, some said with a red-hot poker, in Berkeley Castle. 
 
 Brutal, intelligent, passionate, profligate, imaginative and violent: Sir Roger Mortimer was an extraordinary character. It is not surprising that the queen lost her heart to him. Nor is it surprising that his contemporaries were terrified of him. But until now no one has appreciated the full evil genius of the man. This first biography reveals not only the man's career as a feudal lord, a governor of Ireland, a rebel leader and a dictator of England but also the truth of what happened that night in Berkeley Castle. 
 
‘Mortimer's book roars, races and sings... with a sense of passion and drama and an unrelenting pace’ Daily Telegraph

The Greatest Traitor

The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March

Kerry Hudson

A powerful, personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today's Britain. 
 
'Totally engrossing and deliciously feisty' Bernardine Evaristo 
 
'Staggering... An absolute inspiration' Douglas Stewart, Herald 
 
'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense of being 'lowborn' no matter how far you've come?' 
 
Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. 
 
Twenty years later, Kerry's life is unrecognisable. She's a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books. But she often finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught somehow between two worlds. 
 
Lowborn is Kerry's exploration of where she came from. She revisits the towns she grew up in to try to discover what being poor really means in Britain today and whether anything has changed. 
 
'One of the most important books of the year' Guardian

Lowborn

Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns

Peter Ackroyd

‘Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts’ Simon Callow, Guardian 
 
In this powerful Sunday Times bestseller Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population. 
 
In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. 
 
Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS. 
 
Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

Queer City

Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

A. S. Byatt

In her powerful opening essays - 'Fathers', 'Forefathers' and 'Ancestors' - A. S. Byatt considers the renaissance of the historical novel and discusses particularly the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new 'Darwinian novel'. 
 
These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Muriel Spark, and other contemporary authors, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Pat Barker. 
 
She also offers fascinating insight into her own translation of historical fact into fiction in the two novellas which make up Angels and Insects.

On Histories and Stories

Selected Essays

Simon Callow

The creator of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Henry VIII and Captain Bligh, Charles Laughton's career spans 50 films and 40 stage roles. This entralling biography follows him from his parents' hotel in Scarborough to his climactic assumption of the role of King Lear in Statford at the end of his life. Along the way we meet a galaxy of Hollywood greats - from Korda, Hitchcock and Billy WIlder to Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. We also discover a hugely talented and complex man - a legend in his own lifetime who nonetheless counted himself a failure.

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