The distinguished historian uses neglected sources to present CdeM as a much-traduced campaigner for the peaceful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants, and as a patroness of the arts.
Recounts the author's quest for Adele Hugo, who followed the object of her (unrequited) love, a British soldier, to the Caribbean, and then returned to live out the rest of her days in a Fre... read more
A love hotel on Japan's Inland Sea, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, 1930s' physics: a mesmerising memoir of his parents by the author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
The only woman to reach London from Warsaw during WW2, she was later parachuted back into Poland where she was deeply involved in the Uprising; she then disappeared into the Soviet prison sy... read more
A memoir by this most communicative classicist about her own experiences of suicide, and how she found consolation and understanding of herself and her family through close readings of clas... read more
From a trunk of diaries and letters, the author constructs the lively story of her mother, Celia Paget, and her sister. Lovers and friends included Orwell, Koestler, Camus, Sartre and de Bea... read more
On his death in 2014, George Lucas left his diaries - spanning 60 years and pertaining not to his career as a civil servant but to his after-hours pursuits - to their editor.
LB could turn straw into gold. Here she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. Transformative.
In 1600 Adams was the first English man to step on Japanese shores - one of only nine survivors of a Dutch trading expedition. He became the shogun's advisor and ship builder, and a samurai.... read more
The author and her brother spent a decade at sea; at sixteen she made it ashore in New Zealand, effectively abandoned by her parents. A startling and riveting memoir.
This complex man exposed horrors in the Congo and Amazon, winning renown and a knighthood. But his support for Irish Independence led to his execution for high treason.
Originally published in 2 vols (1969 & 1970), this is a hugely welcome reissue of the amazing, rich memoir by the prolific novelist, journalist and political activist, friend of H.G. Wells a... read more
A deeply personal social history. From ancient Greece to 70s' New York, from Diogenes to her father, Eberstadt explores how people have used their bodies to challenge the world around them.
Besides telling the dismal, astounding story of one of the world's most notorious miscarriages of justice, this new account seeks out the life of the young French officer before he was consu... read more
Like a detective novel of the time, the story of two booksellers who uncovered the forgeries of a pompous bastion of the literary scene in 1930s' London.
The great novelist returns to poetry - where his career began - to consider migration, borders and displacement, from his childhood in Sri Lanka to Canadian rivers and Bulgarian Orthodox chu... read more
Nearly 600 letters from the pre-Raphaelite model who became the wife of William Morris and the lover of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. An impeccably researched, annotated and edited work, this first... read more
Anne Clifford's diaries, Mary Sidney's translations, Aemilia Lanyer's poems, Elizabeth Cary's playwriting: out of these a fine scholar of Renaissance literature constructs an illuminating gr... read more
The role of surrealism and the cultural milieu of Paris in the 1940s helped inspire Boulez's emotional and radical music. CP's last book - on Eric Satie - was excellent.
A many-layered memoir from the Pulitzer-winning author of The Sympathizer: the American dream, the Vietnam War, the life of the refugee, adoption, violence, identity.
CC withdrew to an enclosed world in her mid-20s, to emerge a decade later. This memoir of her private struggles and of tension within the institution is both moving and unexpectedly gripping... read more
Stevenson was once the youngest trader in the city and Citibank's most profitable, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars a day. Then he gave it up. A remarkable memoir - funny, excoriating an... read more
This fascinating account of a forgotten moment in history is part family memoir, part the telling of a Texan offshoot of the early Zionist movement, when 10,000 Jews set sail for Galveston b... read more
He ruled an area of the Indian subcontinent greater than anyone until the British 2000 years later; famously he renounced war for Buddhism and promoted religious toleration throughout his mu... read more
How the daughter of Babur, first Mughal Emperor, wrangled her way out of the harem (for a while) to travel around India, to Persia and beyond. Based on her own account.
The post-war eclipse of the rural by the urban. Joyce interweaves his own Irish family history into wider story of European peasantry to create a rich and varied cultural account of what it ... read more
The embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano rowed across the Channel, swam the Niagara basin twice and became an MP. He and his wife were intimate with the 'Souls'.
A rich study of the gulf between Hardy's fictional women, with whom he seems to have empathised, and the real women around him... who needed a certain hardiness (?) in their troubled relatio... read more
From the emergence of tyranny to the malaise of ennui, LS surveys how Hannah Arendt's life and work can help us confront the perils of contemporary post-truth politics.
The C10th synthesis of Greek thought in Central Asi. Starr's magnificent book is a cultural and intellectual history of the Islamic Enlightenment and its two chief proponents - Ibn Sina and ... read more