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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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Shakespeare

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France. 
 
For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirées and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat. 
 
But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a precarious existence under German Occupation. 
 
Over half a century later, her nephew, Nicholas Shakespeare, found a box of Priscilla's notebooks and journals. He began investigating the rumours that she had escaped a prisoner-of-war camp and fought for the Resistance - and he finally unearthed the truth behind suspicions of disreputable love affairs and far darker secrets.

Priscilla

The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

Arnost Lustig

Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersová has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the German army retreats from the Russian front, Hanka battles cold, hunger, fear and shame, sustained by her hatred for the men she entertains, her friendship with the mysterious Estelle, and her fierce, burning desire for life. 
 
Lovely Green Eyes explores the compromises and sacrifices that an individual may make in order to survive, the way a woman can retain her identity in the face of appalling trauma, and the value of human life itself. This is a remarkable novel, which soars beyond nightmare, leaving the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Lovely Green Eyes

Christopher Isherwood

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York, and the raw Australian outback. 
 
The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time - Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, W. Somerset Maugham and many others. They are most revealing about Isherwood himself - his fiction, his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. 
 
In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period such as the anxieties of the Cold War, the moon landing and the Vietnam war. In The Sixties Isherwood turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

The Sixties

Diaries Volume Two 1960-1969

Jonathan Meiburg

An enthralling voyage of discovery to meet a rare and mysterious bird of prey that puzzled Darwin, fascinates modern-day falconers, and carries secrets of our planet's deep past in its family history. 
 
In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by a 'mischievous' animal he met in the Falklands: rare, crow-like falcons known today as striated caracaras. These clever, fearless birds of prey stole hats and valuables from the crew of the Beagle, and they seemed unusually interested in humans. Darwin couldn't understand why they were confined to a set of remote islands; but he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it. 
 
Almost two centuries later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up the chase. He travels through South America in search of striated caracaras and their close relatives, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of the Guiana Shield, and reveals the wild and surprising story of their origins, their keen and flexible minds, and their possible futures. 
 
'Fascinating' Margaret Atwood, West End Phoenix 
 
'Hugely entertaining and enlightening' Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds

A Most Remarkable Creature

The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey

The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey

Hester Grant

The enthralling story of an eighteenth-century family and their extraordinary achievements. 
 
Four brothers, three sisters. Brought up in a Northumberland rectory and in the close of Durham Cathedral, the Sharps would achieve exalted positions at the heart of British society. In 1781, the celebrated painter Johan Zoffany put the final brush strokes on the luminous portrait that immortalised the siblings’ rise, and their remarkable unity and passion for life. 
 
Ambitious, free-thinking and courageous, the Sharps were pioneers in the major movements that defined the eighteenth century – from political reform and philanthropy to medicine and industry. John, an eminent priest, established a model welfare state at Bamburgh Castle and commissioned the world’s first lifeboat; William became surgeon to George III; while James was a visionary inventor, canal promoter and engineer. Most famously of all, Granville, the youngest son, battled tirelessly as Britain’s first great campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade. Despite the social strictures of their day, Elizabeth, Judith and Frances claimed significant independence, and played key roles in hosting the Sharps’ famous musical parties on barges on the Thames. 
 
In this vivid, moving biography, Hester Grant charts the siblings’ shared journey to prominence, and explores the values and enduring bonds that inspired their success. The Good Sharps brings to life not just these men and women who realised that the future could be different, but also the new world they created.

The Good Sharps

The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain

The Brothers and Sisters Who Remade Their World

Patrick Lienhardt

Olivier Philipponnat

Irène Némirovsky's own life was as dramatic as any fiction. Few writers enjoy posthumous success as astonishing as hers after the international triumph of Suite Française. She was born in 1903 in Kiev to a well-off Jewish family. They fled the Russian revolution, eventually settling in France where, with the publication of David Golder in 1929 - delivered to a publisher just before the birth of her first daughter - Irène swiftly became an acclaimed and successful writer. When France fell to the Nazis, Irène and her family took refuge in a small Burgundy village, but in July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and deported to Auschwitz. Irène died a month later, aged only thirty-nine. 
 
Her biographers take advantage of access to diaries, unpublished documents and surviving family members to examine Irène's remarkable life, from pogroms in Ukraine to gilded holidays in Biarritz, and her troubled relationship with her vain, difficult mother. The result is a brilliant portrait of an exceptional writer and of a turbulent period of European history.

The Life of Irene Nemirovsky

1903-1942

Caroline Moorehead

A thrilling biography of Benito Mussolini's favourite daughter, and a heart-stopping account of the unravelling of the Fascist dream in Italy 
 
'Engrossing... Moorehead has a spirited turn of phrase, a keen eye for the telling detail and pungent quote, and a gift for marshaling complex material' Jenny Uglow, New York Times Book Review 
 
Edda Mussolini was Benito's favourite daughter: spoilt, venal and uneducated but also clever, brave, and ultimately loyal. She was her father's confidante during the 20 years of Fascist rule and married Foreign Secretary Galeazzo Ciano, making them the most celebrated couple in Roman fascist society. 
 
Their fortunes turned in 1943, when Ciano voted against Mussolini in a plot to bring him down. In a dramatic story that takes in hidden diaries, her father's fall and her husband's execution, we come to know a complicated, bold and determined woman who emerges not just as a witness but as a key player in some of the twentieth century's defining moments. 
 
'Vividly told, engrossing history' CLARE MULLEY, author of The Women Who Flew for Hitler 
 
'Precise, empathic . . . a profoundly satisfying, albeit wistful, read and . . . a worryingly relevant one' GUARDIAN

Edda Mussolini

The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe

Alison Weir

Fascinating and authoritative of Britain's royal families from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria, by leading popular historian Alison Weir 
 
'George III is alleged to have married secretly, on 17th April, 1759, a Quakeress called Hannah Lightfoot. If George III did make such a marriage…then his subsequent marriage to Queen Charlotte was bigamous, and every monarch of Britain since has been a usurper, the rightful heirs of George III being his children by Hannah Lightfoot...' 
 
 Britain's Royal Families provides in one volume, complete genealogical details of all members of the royal houses of England, Scotland and Great Britain - from 800AD to the present. Drawing on countless authorities, both ancient and modern, Alison Weir explores the crown and royal family tree in unprecedented depth and provides a comprehensive guide to the heritage of today's royal family – with fascinating insight and often scandalous secrets. 
 
'Staggeringly useful... combines solid information with tantalising appetisers.’ Mail on Sunday

Britain's Royal Families

The Complete Genealogy

Ruth Maier

Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, her world collapsed. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrøm, near Oslo. Although she loved many things about her new country and its people, Ruth became increasingly isolated until she met a soulmate, Gunvor Hofmo, who was to become a celebrated poet. When Norway became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, Ruth's effort to join the rest of her family in Britain became ever more urgent. 
 
Ruth Maier kept a diary from 1934 until she was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of twenty-two. Although she was only in her teens, she shows a sophisticated understanding of the political forces shaping Europe. Ruth is lyrical, witty and incisive and explores universal themes of isolation, identity, love, friendship, desire and justice. Most of all, she seeks what it means to be a human being.

Ruth Maier's Diary

A Jewish girl's life in Nazi Europe

Mark Kurlansky

The Basques are Europe's oldest people, their origins a mystery, their language related to no other on Earth, and even though few in population and from a remote and rugged corner of Spain and France, they have had a profound impact on the world. Whilst inward-looking, preserving their ancient language and customs, the Basques also struck out for new horizons, pioneers of whaling and cod fishing, leading the way in exploration of the Americas and Asia, were among the first capitalists and later led Southern Europe's industrial revolution. 
 
Mark Kurlansky, the author of the acclaimed Cod, blends human stories with economic, political, literary and culinary history to paint a fascinating picture of an intriguing people.

The Basque History Of The World

Will Cohu

In 1966 Will Cohu's grandparents moved to Bramble Carr, a remote cottage on the Yorkshire moors. The summers and winters he spent there were full of freedom and light; only after childhood ended was he aware of the price the adults had paid for life in this most romantic of settings. 
 
 
Navigating family tensions and the trials of growing up, Will describes the close-knit community of North Yorkshire and his family's place within it: the shepherd probing the head-high snowdrifts for his flock; the pub landlord obsessed with military uniforms; the village doctor lost in his love for the purple moorland; Will's glamorous RAF parents; and, at the centre of the story, his beloved but enigmatic grandparents. 
 
The Wolf Pit is an enquiring love letter from Will Cohu to his family, and to a changing rural England that is passionate, frightening and funny.

The Wolf Pit

Helga Schneider

When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to pursue her career. In 1998, Helga received a letter asking her to visit Traudi, now 90-years old, before she dies. Mother and daughter have met only once after Traudi left, on a disastrous visit where Helga first learnt the terrible secret of her mother's past. 
 
Traudi was as an extermination guard in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck and was involved in Nazi 'medical' experiments on prisoners. She has never expressed even the slightest remorse for her actions, yet Helga still hopes that at this final meeting she will find some way to forgive her mother.

Let Me Go

Stella Tillyard

The young George III was a poignant figure, humdrum on the surface yet turbulent beneath: hiding his own passions, he tried hard to be a father to his siblings and his nation. This intimate, fast-moving book tells their intertwined stories. His sisters were doomed to marry foreign princes and leave home forever; his brothers had no role and too much time on their hands - a recipe for disaster. 
 
At the heart of Tillyard's story is Caroline Mathilde, who married the mad Christian of Denmark in her teens, but fell in love with the royal doctor Struensee: a terrible fate awaited them, despite George's agonized negotiations. At the same time he faced his tumultuous American colonies. And at every step a feverish press pounced on the gossip, fostering a new national passion - a heated mix of celebrity and sex.

A Royal Affair

George III and his Troublesome Siblings

Emily Cockayne

Almost everyone has a neighbour. Neighbours can enrich or ruin our lives. They fascinate and worry us in equal measure. Soap operas watched by millions play with every lurid permutation of relationships in fictional neighbourhoods. Disputes over gigantic Leylandii and noise nuisance turn nasty and fill newspaper columns. These stories have a rich history - as long as we have lived in shelters, we have had neighbours. 
 
Emily Cockayne traces the story of the British neighbour through nine centuries - spanning Medieval, Tudor and Victorian periods, two world wars and up to today's modern, virtual world. Cheek by Jowl is social history at its most colourful and compelling and puts the people back in the houses and the houses back on the streets.

Cheek by Jowl

A History of Neighbours

André Brink

It is 1825 and high in the mountains of South Africa a group of slavesstand accused of the murder of their owner, Nicolass van der Merwe, a wealthy Afrikaner farmer. Galant, the van der Merwe family's chief hand, is held leader of the murderous band. Raised with the two sonsof the house, it was not until adulthood and rivalry over Hester, orphaned daughter of a tenant farmer, that he realised their differentroles, their unequal futures and opposed stations in life. A CHAIN OFVOICES stands as a prophetic lesson - when hopes of freedom from slavery are dashed, and when promises of equal treatment are broken, an escalating spiral of bitterness, resentment, and finally, explosiveviolence is inevitable.

Chain Of Voices

Ai Weiwei

A FAMILY STORY AND THE TALE OF A NATION. 
 
 
Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. 
 
'Engrossing...a remarkable story' Sunday Times 
 
Here, through the sweeping lens of his own and his father's life, Ai Weiwei tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years, from the Cultural Revolution to the modern-day Chinese Communist Party. 
 
Here is the story of a childhood spent in desolate exile after his father, Ai Qing, once China's most celebrated poet, fell foul of the authorities. Here is his move to America as a young man and his return to China, his rise from unknown to art-world superstar and international rights activist. Here is his extraordinary account of how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. 
 
It's the story of a father and a son, of exceptional creativity and passionate belief, and of how two indomitable spirits enabled the world to understand their country. 
 
'A story of inherited resilience and self-determination' Observer 
 
'A majestic and exquisitely serious masterpiece about his China... One of the great voices of our time' Andrew Solomon 
 
'Intimate, unflinching...an instant classic' Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

Two lives, one nation and a century of art under tyranny in China

The story of two lives, one nation, and a century of art under tyranny

Jane Ridley

The prequel to The Crown: the first truly candid portrait of George V and Mary, the Queen's grandparents and creators of the modern monarchy 
 
Shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography prize and the History Reclaimed Book of the Year prize 
 
The lasting reputation of George V is for dullness. However throughout his reign, the monarch navigated a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II and he facilitated the first Labour government. 
 
How this supposedly limited man steered the Crown through so many perils is a gripping tale. With unprecedented access to the Royal archives, Jane Ridley has been able to reassess the many myths associated with this dramatic period for the first time. 
 
'Wonderful... Never a dull paragraph' Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Times 
 
'Magnificent... An evocative and touching portrait of a surprisingly impressive man' Philip Hensher, Spectator 
 
'A big, beautiful beast of a book. Fair, thorough and unexpectedly funny' Lucy Worsley

George V

Never a Dull Moment

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