Biography, Letters & Diaries Archives

BIOGRAPHY, LETTERS & DIARIES

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

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham ...

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Mother (at 13) of Henry VII, and the Tudor dynasty, MofB is one of those extraordinary medieval women who wielded immense - even overt - political influence. This is a fine telling of her li... read more

Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker

Lauren Johnson

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Considered controversial, Benson's superb diaries were sealed for one hundred years at his death. This selection shows the novelist, poet, don and Eton master to have been an acute and waspi... read more

The Benson Diary

A.C. Benson

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£60.00

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By the author of the excellent Buddhism: A Journey through History.

The Buddha: Biography of a Myth

Donald S Lopez

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£22.00

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Although very different in temperament, these two great Whig figures joined to fight the slave trade, impeach the governor-general of the East India Company and support the rebellious Americ... read more

Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revo ...

James Grant

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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

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China

Jung Chang

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A substantial biography of one of the scientists who first deciphered DNA.

Crick: A Mind in Motion

Matthew Cobb

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Recounts not just the Genoese navigator's life but also his afterlives, in which he is castigated for bringing pillage and genocide to the Americas.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus

Matthew Restall

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A biography of the restless, dazzling and dubious Sir George Downing: Pepys was his clerk; Milton wrote his letters; Wren was his surveyor (in the eponymous street).

Turncoat: Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s S ...

Dennis Sewell

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A short, admiring new assessment by the distinguished historian.

Queen Elizabeth II: A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign ...

David Cannadine

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The novelist's memoir takes him from a rural postwar childhood to boarding school, Fleet Street and fame as the author of Birdsong and many others.

Fires Which Burned Brightly

Sebastian Faulks

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The 20+ years since Paul Preston's immense book give ample grounds for a reassessment. This is a nuanced and penetrating account of the dictator's life.

El Generalisimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness ...

Giles Tremlett

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A memoir-of-sorts of her beloved house in Campden Hill Square, home to Fraser since 1957, to Harold Pinter, to her children, and to animals - feline, canine and literary.

The House that Spoke: The History of a Home

Antonia Fraser

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Gaskill knew that his uncle had been a POW in Italy, and had cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. A chance conversation leads him to discover that his uncle's story was both m... read more

The Glass Mountain

Malcolm Gaskill

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More entertaining tips and tales from the enterprising dowager of chic and mistress of the well-deployed vodka and tonic.

Manners & Mischief: An A-Z of a Life Lived Well ...

Anne Glenconner

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Hot on the heels of A.N. Wilson's elegant, short biography last year comes this whopper from one of the world's great Goethe scholars.

Goethe: A Life in Ideas

Matthew Bell

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By the present (4th) Earl of Iveagh.

Guinness: A Family Succession: The True Story of the Struggle to Creat ...

Arthur Edward Guinness

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A valuable look at Kant's life and work by a distinguished philosopher; translated from the German.

Kant: A Revolution in Thinking

Marcus Willaschek

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An insight into what may be anticipated from the new pontiff.

Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform

Christopher R. Altieri

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Mansfield wrote some of the best and most enduring stories of the C20th. Woolf declared hers 'was the only writing I was ever jealous of'. This new biography traces her short life (she die... read more

Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life

Gerri Kimber

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Greenblatt's The Swerve was a codex for understanding the Early Modern period. This biography of Kit Marlowe (cobbler's son, playwright, spy) is similarly sprightly and erudite.

Dark Renaissance

Stephen Greenblatt

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Hard to recall that when PM - author of The Snow Leopard, Far Tortuga and other superb books - came to Sandoe's in the '90s, he was regarded almost as a god. An energetic environmental activ... read more

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen

Lance Richardson

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Relates the role of William Miller, son of a Kent baker who fought in the Peninsular War, commanded Cochrane's marines in the Pacific and became the only foreign general instrumental in the ... read more

English Liberator: The Struggle for Independence in Spanish South Amer ...

John Hemming

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The remarkable 'Decca' was the sister who went booted and spurred to the Spanish Civil War and later joined the Communist Party in the USA. The author of The American Way of Death, she had c... read more

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford ...

Carla Kaplan

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A biography of Sydney Redesdale, whose upbringing fitted her for every eccentricity. A scholarly and intriguing portrait of this omni-present but elusive figure.

Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother

Rachel Trethewey

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£22.99

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Thoughts on childhood, old age, nature, politics... Includes some stories and poems.

Funny Thing, Getting Older: And Other Reflections

Michael Morpurgo

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Looks at the dynamics of corrosive secrets that women have been obliged to keep, how they fit into a broader social context and how exposing them has been a release for many. Her own family ... read more

The Book of Revelations: Women and Their Secrets From the 1950s to the ...

Juliet Nicolson

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Remember those groovy windows in Knightsbridge? Transforming the fusty into the outrageous, Portas defined an era.

I Shop, Therefore I Am: The ’90s, Harvey Nicks – and Me ...

Mary Portas

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This dynamic memoir by the political campaigner and Booker-winning author of The God of Small Things centres on her relationship with her mother.

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Arundhati Roy

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A biography of the New Zealander who was one of the foundational figures of modern physics and pioneer of the Cavendish Laboratory.

Ernest Rutherford and the Birth of Modern Physics

Matthew Wright

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A remarkable memoir by a man who came to England in the 1980s as a refugee, when refugees were allowed to work. He has led an exceptionally industrious and successful life since then, but in... read more

No Safer Kinder Hatred: How Racial Hatred and Ethnic Violence Shaped Z ...

Frank Thabani Sayi

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Before retirement, this great independent author/publisher worked for BBC Radio 3. In the spring of 1989, he took a month off to discover what was meant by glasnost. Nearly 40 years later, h... read more

Shadows: Behind the Iron Curtain

Tony Scotland

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Alan Breck's glorious entrance into Kidnapped must be the most dramatic appearance of any character in fiction. His creator's all-too-short life was comparably romantic and adventurous. What... read more

Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Leo Damrosch

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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

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief ...

Richard Holmes

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The abridged version of his 3-vol life is perfect for a sharp-cornered handbag.

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

Charles Moore

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Six decades of letters to family, friends, editors and lovers, from the author of Couples and many others.

A Life in Letters

John Updike

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