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

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Selina Hastings

Nancy Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic, a great tease and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the publication of her novels, above all The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, she became a huge bestseller and a household name. 
 
An inspired letter writer, she wrote almost daily to a wide variety of correspondents, among them Evelyn Waugh, Harold Action, John Betjeman, Lord Berners, Lady Seafield, and, of course, her sisters. 
 
Selina Hastings captures equally the gaiety and frivolity and the unhappy truth of Nancy Mitford's life: her failed marriage and her long, unfulfilled relationship with 'the Colonel' contrasting sharply with literary celebrity and glittering social success. Selina Hastings has written a biography that is superbly entertaining and clear-eyed, of a life that Diana Mosley spoke of as being 'so sad one can hardly bear to contemplate it'.

Nancy Mitford

D J Taylor

Bright Young People/ Making the most of our youth/ They talk in the Press of our social success/ But quite the reverse is the truth. [Noel Coward] 
 
The Bright Young People were one of the most extraordinary youth cults in British history. A pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites, they romped through the 1920s gossip columns. Evelyn Waugh dramatised their antics in Vile Bodies and many of them, such as Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford,Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman, later became household names. Their dealings with the media foreshadowed our modern celebrity culture and even today,we can detect their influence in our cultural life. 
 
 
But the quest for pleasure came at a price. Beneath the parties and practical jokes was a tormented generation, brought up in the shadow of war, whose relationships - with their parents and with each other - were prone to fracture. For many, their progress through the 'serious' Thirties, when the age of parties was over and another war hung over the horizon, led only to drink, drugs and disappointment, and in the case of Elizabeth Ponsonby - whose story forms a central strand of this book - to a family torn apart by tragedy. 
 
 
Moving from the Great War to the Blitz, Bright Young People is both a chronicle of England's 'lost generation' of the Jazz Age, and a panoramic portrait of a world that could accommodate both dizzying success and paralysing failure. Drawing on the writings and reminiscences of the Bright Young People themselves, D.J. Taylor has produced an enthralling social and cultural history, a definitive portrait of a vanished age.

Bright Young People

The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940

Katie Whitaker

Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration.   As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess'. Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644.  In Paris, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a great horseman. They lived together in exile for 10 years, as part of the -migr- royalist circle that included aristocrats and the intellectual giants of the day, such as Descartes and Hobbes.   Margaret had always loved poetry and philosophy - and now she became a writer.   Plays, short fiction, fantasies, 'science fiction' and verse, orations, letters, essays, an autobiography and a biography, six philosophical treatises and one utopia -   She made her mark as one of the most determined and prolific of female writers in an age when less than one per cent of published work was by women and society was shocked that she dared to publish under her own name.

Mad Madge

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic

Edmund de Waal

From the author of the bestselling phenomenon The Hare with Amber Eyes 
 
As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well. 
 
 The Camondos lived just a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears. Like de Waal's family, they were part of belle époque high society. They were also targets of anti-Semitism. 
 
Count Moïse de Camondo created a spectacular house filled with art for his son to inherit. Over a century later, de Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and, in a haunting series of letters addressed to Camondo, he tells us what happened next. 
 
'Illuminating... A wonderful tribute to a family and to an idea' Guardian 
 
'Letters to Camondo immerses you in another age... Dazzling' Financial Times

Letters to Camondo

Livia Manera Sambuy

A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War 
 
‘Remarkable and compelling’ Edmund de Waal 
 
‘Thoroughly engaging’ Kamila Shamsie 
 
In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever. 
The caption claims that the Punjabi princess Amrit Kaur sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year. 
 
For Livia, this marks the beginning of a compulsive search for the truth as she delves into the history of the British Raj, the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, and the lives of extraordinary figures: bankers, jewellers, explorers and spies. 
 
‘An ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes’ Jhumpa Lahiri 
 
‘A tantalizing true story . . . In Search of Amrit Kaur plunges into the glittery world of Indian royalty’ New York Times Book Review

In Search of Amrit Kaur

An Indian Princess in Wartime Paris

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born the fifth child of his father's third wife, in a family that includes twenty-four children born to four different mothers. He spent his 1930s childhood as the apple of his mother's eye, before attending school to slake what is considered a bizarre thirst for learning. 
 
As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya begin to impinge on the boy's life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through the story of his grandparents and parents, and his brothers' involvement in the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi deftly etches a tumultuous era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.

Dreams in a Time of War

Daniel Swift

‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de Waal 
 
In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade. 
 
 At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. 
 
 Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.

The Bughouse

The poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound

Mark Garnett

In this groundbreaking new book, Mark Garnett charts the changes in British politics, society and culture since 1975. In the mid-1970s Britons spent much of their time complaining - and seemingly for good reason. A Labour government with a wafer-thin majority was struggling in vain against rampant inflation; the headlines were full of strikes, serial killers and sporting disasters; while in the streets anti-fascist demonstrators clashed with the racists of the National Front. 
 
Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century seems a very different and much quieter place, but is it as 'apathetic' as the political commentators argue? And were the 1970s really as 'angry' as people believed?

From Anger To Apathy

The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain since 1975

Rebecca Fraser

A Times History Book of the Year 
 
The voyage of the Mayflower is one of the seminal events in world history. But the story did not end with her arrival on the frozen coast of New England in 1620. In an epic history, Rebecca Fraser relates one ordinary family’s extraordinary response to the challenges of life in America. Despite the intense physical trials of living in the New World, Edward Winslow found America exotic and enticing. His remarkable friendship with Massasoit, the King of the Wampanoags, is part of the legend of Thanksgiving. Yet, fifty years later, Edward’s son Josiah was commanding the New England militias against Massasoit’s son in King Philip’s War. A fast-paced intensely human portrait, The Mayflower Generation reveals the contradictions between generations as they made the painful decisions that determined the future of America.

The Mayflower Generation

The Winslow Family and the Fight for the New World

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir begins half an hour before his release on 12 December 1978. 
 
A year earlier, he recalls, armed police arrived at his home and took him to Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. There, Ngugi lives in a block alongside other political prisoners, but he refuses to give in to the humiliation. He decides to write a novel in secret, on toilet paper – it is a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross. 
 
Wrestling with the Devil is Ngugi’s unforgettable account of the drama and challenges of living under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the pain caused by his isolation from his family, but also the spirit of defiance and the imaginative endeavours that allowed him to survive.

Wrestling with the Devil

A Prison Memoir

The gripping story of the lure of porcelain, or 'white gold', from the Number One bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. 
 
** A Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller ** 
 
 "Other things in the world are white but for me porcelain comes first" 
 
 A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside carries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire of the kiln, and fuse into porcelain - translucent, luminous, white. 
 
 Acclaimed writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest - a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to its creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, and the many whose livelihoods, minds and bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a thousand years and reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times. 
 
 In these intimate and compelling encounters with the people and landscapes who made porcelain, Edmund de Waal enriches his understanding of this rare material, the 'white gold' he has worked with for decades. 
 
'This is a haunting book, a book that amasses itself piece by piece, gaining in weight.' Olivia Laing, New Statesman 
 
'A mighty achievement' Guardian

The White Road

A Journey Into Obsession

a pilgrimage of sorts

Damian Le Bas

'I needed to get to the stopping places, so I needed to get on the road. It was the road where I might at last find out where I belonged.' 
 
Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places they worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. 
 
In a bid to better understand his heritage, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today. 
 
‘A beautiful writer who seems born to tell this fascinating story’ Amy Liptrot 
 
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award 
Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize

The Stopping Places

A Journey Through Gypsy Britain

Phoebe McIntosh

'A must-read... compulsively timely novel' Stylist 
 
When Layla and Andy first meet, they can't believe they have the same surname. It feels like fate… 
 
Sera, Layla’s best friend, has her doubts about Andy. As the couple fall deeper in love, Sera becomes more and more vocal about Layla settling down with a white boy. And then, only a few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a devastating discovery – could their families be linked in the worst possible way? 
 
What seemed like a fairy-tale romance is rapidly derailed as Layla begins to uncover parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined – or, perhaps, had simply learnt to ignore. 
 
And now, she faces an impossible choice. 
 
**A STYLIST UNMISSABLE BOOK FOR 2024** 
 
‘A warm, sweet love story, and a thought-provoking examination of the British slave trade and its legacy’ MARIAN KEYES 
 
'I loved this book' JACQUELINE CROOKS, author of Fire Rush 
 
'So kind and smart and clear-eyed' HOLLY GRAMAZIO, author of The Husbands 
 
READERS LOVE DOMINOES: 
‘Tender, thought-provoking and hard-hitting’ 
‘Kept me second guessing how things would turn out until the very end’ 
‘Incredibly thought-provoking’ 
‘Such an important novel’ 
‘I laughed, I cried, I learned A LOT’ 
‘So much more than a love story’

Dominoes

Jehanne Wake

The Caton sisters were Southern belles descended from the first settlers in Maryland, and were expected to 'marry a Plantation'. But they were independent, fascinated by politics, clever with money, romantic in mood. Arriving In London in 1816 the three sisters forged their own destinies in the face of intense prejudice, against both Americans and Catholics. The widowed Marianne shocked the world by marrying the Wellington's wayward elder brother, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and appearing as a 'Catholic Yankee' among the Protestant Anglo-Irish. Louisa eventually became Duchess of Leeds, and a friend of Queen Victoria, while the sphere in which Bess shone was the stockmarket, as queen of speculators. 
 
Based on intimate unpublished letters, Sisters of Fortune is a brilliant portrait of love between sisters, a most unusual story of money and power and a fascinating glimpse of how these extraordinary women influenced the social and international relations of their time.

Sisters of Fortune

The First American Heiresses to Take England by Storm

‘Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Guardian 
 
When Ngugi wa Thiong’o arrives at the prestigious Makerere University, it embodies all the potential and excitement of the early 1960s. Campus is a haven of opportunity for the brightest African students, a meeting place for thinkers and writers from all over the world, and its alumni are filling Africa’s emerging political and cultural positions. 
 
 Despite the challenges he faces as a young black man in a British colony, it is here that Ngugi begins to find his voice as a playwright, journalist and novelist, writing his first, pivotal works just as the countries of East Africa enter the final stages of their independence struggles.

Birth of a Dream Weaver

A Writer’s Awakening

John Campbell

In the summer of 1911 David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, hired a young schoolteacher called Frances Stevenson to tutor his daughter in the summer holidays. He was forty-eight, and married with four children. She was twenty-two, highly intelligent as well as very attractive, and Lloyd George soon began to employ her as his secretary. 
 
At the beginning of 1913 they became lovers, on terms spelt out by Lloyd George with ruthless clarity. Their secret relationship was to last for thirty years until his wife's death finally allowed Lloyd George to marry her in 1943. 
 
Combining sex, romance, family feuds and high politics- based on letters, diaries and a vast range of material, published and unpublished - If Love Were All... is the first detailed study of this extraordinary relationship, one that was known about by everyone in politics but never revealed in the press, and the strains that it placed on both parties.

If Love Were All...

The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George

Juliet Nicolson

One woman’s investigation into the nature of memory, the past, and above all, love. 
 
All families have their myths and Juliet Nicolson’s was no different: her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother’s Tory-conventional background. 
 
A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from

A House Full of Daughters

Laura Freeman

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism 
 
'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it' 
EDMUND DE WAAL 
 
'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for' 
OBSERVER 
 
The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. 
 
Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.

Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Helen Rappaport

A TRUE STORY OF LIES, BEAUTY AND BLACKMAIL IN VICTORIAN LONDON 
_________________________ 
Madame Rachel had everything. 
 
A Mayfair address; the title of 'purveyor to Her Majesty the Queen'; a shop full of exotic, expensive creams and potions; and a clientele of the aristocratic, the rich - and the gullible. 
 
Little did they suspect that Madame Rachel had once been a poor fish-fryer in a disease-ridden, grubby corner of Victorian London. Her shop in New Bond Street lured her wealthy clients in their droves, enticed by the promise of eternal beauty. What they found there was a con-woman and fraudster who made a career out of lies, treachery and the desperate hopes of women wanting to be 'beautiful for ever'. 
 
Beautiful For Ever is a thrilling tale of love affairs, scandal, blackmail, high-profile court cases, suicide and fraud, with the extraordinary Madame Rachel right at the centre of it all.

Beautiful For Ever

Madame Rachel of Bond Street - Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer

Jane Ridley

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 
 
Edward VII, who gave his name to the Edwardian era but was always known as Bertie, was fifty-nine when he finally came to power and ushered out the Victorian age. The eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Bertie was bullied by both his parents. Denied any proper responsibilities, the heir to the throne spent his time eating (which earned him the nickname ‘Tum Tum’), pursuing women (which Queen Victoria held to be the reason for Albert’s early demise), gambling, going to house parties and race meetings, and shooting pheasants. His arranged marriage to the stunning Danish princess Alexandra gave him access to the European dynastic network; but his name was linked with many beauties, including Lillie Langtry and Winston Churchill’s mother. This magnificent new biography provides new insight into the playboy prince while painting a vivid portrait of the age in all its excess and eccentricity.

Bertie: A Life of Edward VII

David Thomson

Woodbrook is a rare house that gives its name to a small, rural area in Ireland, not far from the old port of Sligo. It has been owned since the seventeenth century by the Anglo-Irish Kirkwoods. In 1932, David Thomson, aged eighteen, went there are a tutor. He stayed for ten years. 
 
This memoir, acknowledged as a masterpiece, grew out of two great loves - for Woodbrook and for Phoebe, his pupil. In it he builds up a delicate, lyrical picture of a gentle pre-war society, of Irish history and troubled Anglo-Irish relations, and of a delightful family. Above all, his story reverberates with the enchantment of falling in love and with the desolation of bereavement.

Woodbrook

Stella Tillyard

A fascinating insight into 18th century aristocratic life through the lives of the four Lennox sisters, the great grandchildren of Charles II, whose extraordinary lives spanned the period 1740-1832. Passionate, witty and moving, the voices of the Lennox sisters reach us with immediacy and power, drawing the reader into their remarkable lives, and making this one of the most enthralling historical narratives to appear for many years.

Aristocrats

Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

Rachel Hewitt

'Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own path' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ, author of Invisible Women 
 
When Rachel loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other absences. Running across moors and mountains used to help her feel at home in her body but now feels fraught with danger. 
 
Rachel goes in search of a new family: the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts and photographed fearless women climbing, skating and tobogganing at breakneck speeds. Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature. 
 
‘A book of limitless curiosity and eloquent passion’ The Times

In Her Nature

How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors

Johanna Adorján

One Sunday morning in October, István and his wife Vera start their day as usual. They tidy their house; Vera makes a festive cake to put in the freezer and cuts fresh roses for a vase in the living room. That evening, after nearly fifty years of marriage, they lie down in their bed and take their own lives. Having survived the tumult of twentieth-century Europe and after raising a family together, they could not accept the words 'until death do us part'. 
 
While sifting through the fragments of the family history in an attempt to understand this glamorous and enigmatic couple, their granddaughter Johanna Adorján imagines their final day. Amid the family stories and portraits by friends, she dares to give voice to their never-mentioned experiences in the Holocaust and their escape from Hungary during the uprising of 1956.

An Exclusive Love

A Memoir

Claire Ratinon

A powerful work of memoir and storytelling that will change the way we think about the natural world. 
 
Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire Ratinon grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. She lived in cities, reluctant to be outdoors and stuck with the belief that success and status could fill the space where belonging was absent. 
 
But a chance encounter with a rooftop farm was the start of a journey that caused her to rethink the life she'd been creating and her beliefs about who she ought to be. Enlivened, she turned her hand to growing food in London before finding herself yearning for a small parcel of land to call her own. 
 
Unearthed tells the story of her leaving the city for the English countryside - and her first garden - in the hope of forging a pathway towards the embrace of the natural world and a sense of belonging cultivated on her own terms. 
 
'Ratinon's story will change hearts and minds' Alice Vincent 
 
'A beautiful book about nature...I recommend it' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

Unearthed

On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong

Laura Cumming

**WINNER OF THE SALTIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024** 
**WINNER OF THE WRITERS' PRIZE 2024 | NON-FICTION** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024** 
 
 
A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean. 
 
‘Brilliant’ Edmund de Waal * ‘Captivating’ Nina Stibbe * 'Extraordinary' India Knight 
 
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving behind his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch. 
 
Thunderclap explores what happened to Fabritius before and after the disaster whilst interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her painter father and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. It takes the reader from seventeenth-century Delft to twentieth-century Scottish islands, from Rembrandt’s studio to wartime America and contemporary London. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean, how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. 
 
‘Superb…this book taught me to see anew’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A book that often borders on the sublime in its sentiment and beauty’ Sunday Times

Thunderclap

A memoir of art and life & sudden death

Martin Pugh

The suffragettes outraged Victorian society but their personal lives were just as dramatic as their public actions. In this gripping and incisive account of the Pankhursts, Martin Pugh reveals the full story behind this unique family: Emmeline, the domineering mother; Christabel, the favourite daughter, who became an Adventist and admirer of Mussolini; Sylvia, the 'scarlet woman'; adn Adela, banished to Australia after a bitter rift. 
 
The result is a narrative that reads like a novel, and a brilliant insight into the history of a family that changed the face of British society for ever.

The Pankhursts

The History of One Radical Family

Simi Bedford

Abiola is raised as an aristocratic African warrior in a highly developed civilisation, but when he is betrayed and sold into slavery in America he is forcibly transformed into the property of a French immigrant. Renamed Cornelius, he and fellow slave Delilah begin a relationship which culminates in the birth of their daughter, Epiphany, and the new family plan to escape their servitude and find a better life for themselves... 
 
But can they return to Africa and find true freedom?

Not With Silver

Margaret Forster

In 1831 John Dodgson Carr, son of a Quaker grocer, set off to walk from his home in Kendal to Carlisle, determined to launch a great enterprise. Within 15 years, Carr's of Carlisle had become one of the largest baking businesses in the world -and is a by-word for biscuits to this day. Following his trail to Carlisle (where she herself was born and grew up), Margaret Forster brings 19th-century daily life into vivid focus and charts the rise and rise of a middle-class family like the Carrs, ambitious, innovative yet sternly religious. This is history as it was lived by the men and women both above and below stairs - from the shop floor to the comfortable bourgeois homes of the paternalistic Carrs. We see the conflict between religion and profit, the family feuds and the changing face of a city through this compelling historical narrative, told with Margaret Forster's characteristic blend of scholarship, readability and marvellous attention to the texture of everyday life.

Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin

A Family and Their Times 1831-1931

Julia Blackburn

In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years. 
 
In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Ms Bates says she was most happy. She fuses her own imagination and experience with that of Daisy Bates, unitl she seems to be recalling this other life as it it were her own.

Daisy Bates in the Desert

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Doctor Who: The Satan pit

Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood

East of Eden

White Nights

Extracts

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Features

Beyond Brideshead: why Evelyn Waugh needs to be reclaimed as our funniest writer

A flatlay of some of Nancy Mitford's most notable works. 

Reading lists

Where to start with Nancy Mitford

Beautiful classics for the shelf-conscious bookworm

11 beautiful classics for the shelf-conscious bookworm

Interviews

Meet the author: Martin Latham, the country's leading bookseller

The glittering highs and dark lows of 8 books set in the 1920s

The glittering highs and dark lows of 7 books set in the 1920s

Eight favourite aristocratic classics

Funny books guaranteed to make you laugh out loud

Reading rituals: what's your strangest book habit?

Despite the war, the 1940s was a bumper decade for publishing

Books that shaped the 1940s

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

The rising stars of 2026: discover the must-read debut novels of the year

An illustration of a book against a background

20 novels that shaped the Victorian era

A collage of book covers on a light blue background. Titles include I Capture the Castle, Beloved, The Secret History and The Wind in the Willows.

100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers

The best literary podcasts for book lovers

39 of the best literary and book podcasts for book lovers

20 books that defined the 1930s

From Jane Austen's Chawton to Bram Stoker's Whitby, this is the definitive literary tour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

A literary tour of the United Kingdom

Photo of authors James Holland and Al Murray in the Penguin Podcast studio

Showing results for: ‘Evelyn Waugh’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter