It is almost impossible to remember that the characters aren’t four real women. Powerful, evocative and continually surprising in all its insights, Dream Count is a vivid exploration of ... read more
The intervention of the law in the lives of children, using the experiences of Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O'Brien, Alice Walker and Britney Spears... read more
Favourite and lover of James I and beloved friend of his son; husband, father, art collector, tireless statesman... The cost of his pearl-spilling outfit when he went to meet Henrietta Maria... read more
33 years after publication of her huge bestseller Wild Swans, JC picks up where she left off... in 1978, leaving Chengdu as a student bound for London. 'It was like landing on Mars...' What ... read more
Holmes's superb biographies of Shelley and Coleridge were followed by his dazzling study of the Romantic period, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terr... read more
U-boats were central to Hitler's strategy, a major threat to the Allied forces. Intensely claustrophobic, at the mercy of the elements, they were also feared by their crews who had the highe... read more
The author pays tribute to the merchant seamen of many countries, as well as the Allied navies, who experienced the harrowing dangers of the Arctic convoys supporting the essential Soviet wa... read more
Larissa Salmina was a wild child of the USSR who rose to be Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage by her mid twenties; Francis Haskell was a distinguished, deracinated Cambridge art hi... read more
Observations of small things from Slater's notebooks over the years. Zen and the art of ... watching a butterfly ... eating a mango ... smelling moss ... or macaroni cheese ... Slater is a d... read more
Although an academic, the prolific historian was not limited to an ivory tower: he cared about the world, and this biography reflects the difficulty of engaging with its changes.
From one of Austen's biographers, here is an entertaining novel in which Jane and her family are on holiday in Sidmouth in 1801, where her naval brother is on leave and handsome strangers st... read more
A thoughtful, articulate exploration of the ancient right of asylum and hospitality, of the modern idea of refuge that keeps others out, and of the stories we tell that can bridge these pole... read more
This is the journal Didion wrote in 1999 detailing her sessions with a psychiatrist. They concern her work, her daughter and her own childhood and parents.
The un-making of the Raj: the 50-year process by which a single entity was torn into a dozen modern nations. SD tackles the immense complexities with gusto and intelligence.
The undermining of Communism in Poland and elsewhere through books: here is the story of the CIA programme to disseminate banned literature (Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, etc.) behind the Ir... read more