Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham's studies of the lives and masterpieces of ten great novelists are outstanding examples of literary criticism at its finest. Afforded here are some of the formulae of greatness in the genre, as well as the flaws and heresies which enfeeble it. Written by a master of fiction, Ten Novels and Their Authors is a unique and invaluable guide.

Ten Novels And Their Authors

From 1892, when he was eighteen, until 1949, when this book was first published, Somerset Maugham kept a notebook. It is without doubt one of his most important works. Part autobiographical, part confessional, packed with observations, confidences, experiments and jottings it is a rich and exhilarating admission into this great writer's workshop

A Writer's Notebook

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 author's ideas about style, literarture, art, drama and philosophy, but also an illuminating insight into this great writer's craft.

The Summing Up

Graham Greene

In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles. His journey took him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot. The experiences were the inspiration for his acclaimed novel, The Power and the Glory.

The Lawless Roads

Graham Greene's 'long journey through time' began in 1904, when he was born into a tribe of Greenes based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A Sort of Life Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, The Man Within was published in 1929. A Sort of Life reveals, brilliantly and compellingly, a life lived and an art obsessed by 'the dangerous edge of things'.

A Sort of Life

Collected Essays contains nearly eighty essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and stimulating; his subjects brought vividly to life. The resulting collection is as revealing as autobiography and characteristically rich in humour, insight and doubt.

Collected Essays

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; as if seeking out danger, Greene travelled to Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days of the French, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa, and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can, about people and places, about faith, doubt, fear and, not least, the trials and craft of writing.

Ways Of Escape

To Graham Greene, 'Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.' IN SEARCH OF A CHARACTER contains two African notebooks: Congo Journal, which records Graham Greene's travels in 1959, and his stay at the Yonda leper colony in the jungle which inspired the story for A Burnt-Out Case. Convoy to West Africa describes Greene's voyage in a cargo boat during the Second World War, from Liverpool to Freetown, Sierra Leone, the setting for THE HEART OF THE MATTER.

In Search Of a Character

Two African Journals: Congo Journey and Convoy to West Africa

Diana Cooper

Lady Diana Cooper was a star of the early twentieth stage, screen and social scene. This first instalment of her sparkling autobiography tells of her upbringing, her beautiful artistic mother and aristocratic father, her debut into high society and the glittering parties - 'dancing and extravagance and lashing of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses' - which were interrupted with the outbreak of the First World War. This volume ends with Diana's marriage to the 'love of her life', diplomat and politician Duff Cooper.

The Rainbow Comes and Goes

Josephine Baker

This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words. 
 
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. 
 
Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance and was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the war she became a civil rights activist, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl of mixed heritage, born in Missouri to a poor mother and a father she did not know. 
 
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century. 
 
‘Translated gorgeously into English… A delightful, nourishing read’ Guardian 
 
‘She was a beacon of joy and fellowship and her smile…reaches out to us across the years’ Financial Times 
 
‘Josephine Baker certainly shook things up. This memoir demonstrates - vividly - the pleasure she took in doing it’ Washington Post 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IJEOMA OLUO 
 
TRANSLATED BY ANAM ZAFAR AND SOPHIE LEWIS

Fearless and Free

A Memoir

Lady Diana Cooper had been famous from her earliest youth, the subject of gossip and adoration as the queen of the 'Coterie', an exclusive high society set. Her marriage to Duff Cooper, a rising political star, and her career on the stage and in early silent films only increased her notoriety. Her second volume of autobiography chronicles these years in the run-up to the Second World War, and her adventures as an unconventional hostess, actress, wife and mother are told in typically fast-paced, witty and brilliant style.

The Light of Common Day

Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen's Court describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when Elizabeth Bowen was forced to sell the family house she loved. Bowen reviews ten generations of her family, representatives of the Protestant Irish gentry whose lives were dominated by property, lawsuits, formidable matriarchs, violent conflicts, hunting, drinking, and self-destructive fantasies. 
 
Seven Winters recalls with endearing candour Bowen's family and her Dublin childhood as seen through the eyes of a child who could not read till she was seven and who fed her imagination only on sights and sounds.

Bowen's Court & Seven Winters

Vita Sackville-West

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JULIET NICOLSON 
 
Vita Sackville-West was an extraordinary woman from a long line of extraordinary women – this book tells their stories. Her grandmother Pepita, daughter of an old-clothes pedlar, made her fortune as a dancer and had a scandalous affair with an English diplomat. Their illegitimate daughter Victoria, Vita's mother, spent her childhood hidden in a convent but went on to be the glamorous mistress of Knole, one of the grandest old houses in England. Vita brings her legendary wit, passion and eccentricity to this colourful family portrait.

Pepita

Helen Macdonald

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. 
 
 How do we carry on when someone close to us dies? Is it simply a case of putting one foot in front of the other in a bleak new world or do we need something more? Reeling with grief after the sudden death of her father, Helen Macdonald found herself turning to the wild for comfort. With breathtaking honesty and insight, she recounts her months spent taming a goshawk and how, finally, this strange kinship led her to the first tentative steps to recovery. 
 
 Selected from H is for Hawk 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
 A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. 
 
 Discover the Vintage Minis ‘Head Space’ series: 
 
 Therapy by Stephen Grosz 
 Family by Mark Haddon

Recovery

Vintage Minis

This last volume of Lady Diana Cooper's memoirs covers the years of the Second World War and its aftermath, when her husband Duff Cooper served as Minister of Information and then in various diplomat posts around the world. We accompany the Coopers on their travels from the Dorchester Hotel during the breathless days of the Blitz, to a happy sojourn farming in Sussex, to Singapore and Algiers and eventual retirement to France, all told with Diana's unique perspective and enchanting style.

Trumpets from the Steep

Christopher Isherwood

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Kathleen and Frank

Elspeth Huxley

When Elspeth Huxley’s pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they make up for in determination: building a grass house, employing local Kikuyu tribe members and painstakingly transforming their patch of wilderness into a working farm. Huxley’s unforgettable childhood memoir is a sensitive account of settler life at the turn of the twentieth century and a love song to the harshness and beauty of East Africa.

The Flame Trees Of Thika

Memories of an African Childhood

Nancy Mitford

When Jeanne-Antoinette was nine, she was told by a fortune teller that she would one day become the mistress of the handsome young Louix XV - from that day she was groomed to become 'a morsel fit for a King'. Nancy Mitford lovingly tells the story of how the little girl rose, against a backdrop of savage social-climbing, intrigue, excess and high drama, to become the most powerful women of the eighteenth century French court, Le Pompadour.

Madame de Pompadour

Anthony Burgess

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.

Little Wilson and Big God

Ernest Hemingway

This is Hemingway's East African safari journal. 
 
'All I wanted to do was get back to Africa' 
 
Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man. 
 
'In a class by itself - the country at all hours shines bright and clear in these pages' Daily Telegraph 
 
'The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere' New York Times

Green Hills of Africa

The two saints whose lives Vita Sackville-West contrasts in this double biography were recorded by very different epithets: 'the great' and 'the little'. Both women were Carmelites, both canonised and both shared the same name. But whilst Teresa of Avila was aristocratic, intellectual, vigorous and humorous, a Spanish woman of the sixteenth century, Thérèse of Lisieux was a guileless and sentimental figure of the French bourgeoisie. Teresa, the great mystic, is the patron saint of Spain; Thérèse, the humble nun, is probably the most beloved saint in the entire Calendar. The extraordinary rise of the cult of both women is scrutinised.

The Eagle and the Dove

The meeting of Voltaire, successful financier, famous poet and troublemaker, and the enchanting amateur physicist and countess Émilie du Châtelet, was a meeting of both hearts and minds. In the Château de Cirey, the two brilliant intellects scandalised the French aristocracy with their passionate love affair and provoked revolutions both political and scientific with their groundbreaking work in literature, philosophy and physics. 
Nancy Mitford's account of the love affair of the Enlightenment is, in the author's own words, 'a shriek from beginning to end'.

Voltaire in Love

Margaret Forster

This biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written with reference to Browning correspondence only recently available, argues that the poet was a strong and determined woman largely responsible for her own incarceration in Wimpole Street. The author traces her life from her early childhood and adolescence and explores her marriage. She draws a picture of early Victorian family life and aims to show that Elizabeth was a considerable and dedicated poet, self-willed, witty and courageous. Forster has also edited the companion volume "Selected Poems" of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and is author of several other biographies.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Andrew Turnbull

Scott Fitzgerald follows the life of one of America's most enduring authors, from his early years in St Paul and at Princeton to New York in the twenties, the French Riviera, Baltimore, and finally Hollywood. Andrew Turnbull tells the story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, revised and finally published when he was twenty-four, making him instantly famous, and his tender love affair with Zelda Sayre, from their glittering early life to the years Zelda spent in and out of sanatoriums. A literary generation, too, comes alive, including Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald lived on Turnbull's family estate in Baltimore in the early 1930s and there befriended young Andrew, then aged eleven. Turnbull's personal relationship with Fitzgerald and the hundreds of interviews with those who knew him elegantly capture the dramatic, tragic story of F. Scott and the glow and pathos of his flamboyant life.

Scott Fitzgerald

Franz Kafka

Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer were written between 1912 and 1917, during which time they were twice engaged to be married. This complex relationship, which coincided with a period of great productivity for Kafka, gave him both hope and strength, but gradually disllusionment and the onset of illness drove them apart. These letters remain as a monument to the inner life of a creative artist.

Letters to Felice

Michael Ondaatje

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.' 
 
Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society. 
 
In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Running in the Family

Patrick Modiano

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15. 
 
One winter night in 1941, a Jewish girl runs away from her Paris boarding school. Stumbling across her disappearance listed in an old newspaper, Patrick Modiano finds himself propelled on a quest to exhume her fate. 
 
His search will go on to last a decade. Little more will be found, just fragments of a lost family history, a sense of the dark streets of occupied Paris, Dora’s name on a list of those sent to Auschwitz. And the spectre of Modiano’s own troubled past, from which he can no longer look away. 
 
‘One of France’s most important novelists’ The New York Times 
 
'[A] spokesman for the disappeared’ Guardian

The Search Warrant

Dora Bruder

Virginia Woolf

'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...' 
 
At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat, and sapphist Vita Sackville-West. Virginia wrote in her diary that she didn't think much of Vita's conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs... It was to be the start of almost twenty years of flirtation, friendship, and literary collaboration. Their correspondence ended only with Virginia's suicide in 1941. 
 
Intimate and playful, these selected letters and diary entries allow us to hear the women's constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Eavesdrop on the affair that inspired Virginia to write Orlando, and discover an extraordinary relationship which - even a hundred years later - feels radical and relatable. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM ALISON BECHDEL, AUTHOR OF FUN HOME AND CREATOR OF THE BECHDEL TEST.

Love Letters: Vita and Virginia

Isaac Bashevis Singer

In this autobiographical work, specifically mentioned in Issac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize citation, Singer remembers his childhood in Warsaw, and especially the bet din, or Jewish Court, in his father's home on working-class Krochmalna Street. Advice seekers and petitioners making wills or seeking marriage settlements daily visit the rabbi in his study. In a world on the brink of modernity, Singer's gentle, learned father and his mother, equally pious but eminently practical, maintain a stubbornly traditional existence. In My Father's Court is a tribute to their efforts, and a fine evocation of life in early-twentieth century Warsaw.

In My Father's Court

Laurie Lee

Andalusia is a passion - and fifteen years after his last visit Laurie Lee returned. He found a country broken by the Civil War, but the totems of indestructible Spain survive: the Christ in agony, the thrilling flamenco cry-the pride in poverty, the gypsy intensity in vivid whitewashed slums, the cult of the bullfight, the exultation in death, the humour of hopelessness-the paradoxes deep in the fiery bones of Spain. Rich with kaleidoscopic images, A Rose for Winter is as sensual and evocative as the sun-scorched landscape of Andalusia itself.

A Rose For Winter

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