Two women in their mid-twenties, stifled by marriage and the monotony of Hampstead society, come across an advertisement in The Times: 'To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small m... read more
If you enjoy books that make you laugh aloud, this darkly humorous, touching and brilliantly original explication of a deeply pessimistic worldview might be your thing. The author attributes... read more
Short stories - almost vignettes - of the lives of working-class young women in Battersea and Clapham Junction, first published in 1963, at the same time as Dunn's husband, Jeremy Sandford, ... read more
The actor and director is a fine writer, as many will recall from his memoirs. These stories are witty (of course), intermittantly dissolute and beguiling.
For those prepared to forego a life of Zen-like calm to relish the pinpricks of irritation rising to deafening howls when listening to The Four Seasons on a loop on the telephone while waiti... read more
A generous anthology that ranges from antiquity to the contemporary - edited by the firebrand octogenarian feminist and Shakespeare scholar, whose age has in no way diminished her intelligen... read more
DJ takes on another Big Year, this time the one that produced Horses, Blood on the Tracks and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. His book on '95, Faster than a Cannonball, was a riot.
Born in Russia in 1894, Gala escaped the Revolution and lived in Paris with Paul Eluard and then Max Ernst before meeting Dali in 1929. Klein argues that she, as the Mother of Surrealism wit... read more
From WW2, when her father-in-law Winston Churchill engaged her as a 'secret weapon', to her later support of Bill Clinton, Harriman was an extraordinarily powerful force in political and soc... read more
Freud is the primary focus here, but we also encounter Klimt, Schiele, Herzl, Empress Sisi and many others in this fine account of the new understanding of the mind that arose from Vienna at... read more
The author's Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. Since then, a great deal of new material has come out and he has addressed the subject again.
Seven children come together after the death of their father but find their attempts to mourn him thwarted by his will. The result is this deliciously funny, heartening, somewhat dark caper ... read more