Lucy Atkinson (1817-1893) was an English Atkinson was an English nanny working in Russia. In 1848 she set out with her new husband on a six-year exploration of Siberia and Central Asia, by f... read more
A traditional rock climber for a decade or more, Fleming describes the dance between the self and the rock and its electrifying charge. It's also, for her, the ultimate way to connect with n... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Acute and wide-ranging, these disparate glimpses come together (ha!) to make up a picture not only of the 'Fab Four' but of the new and colourful 1960s' world that they helped to usher in. ... read more
The Director of the V&A looks at how the great ceramicist and Lunar man transformed society by creating an early form of international mass market, while also significantly contributing to t... read more
An outstanding evocation of living in London in the late '70s and early '80s, with its curious mix of modernity and grit, analogue but on the cusp of the digital age.
Following renewed interest in one of Britain's most popular Prime Ministers, this new biog draws attention to his considerable achievements instead of dwelling on Munich to the exclusion of ... read more
Vol 1 of the new (unabridged) edition - eagerly anticipated and widely enjoyed - was published earlier this year. This second volume takes us from Munich to the fall of Mussolini. As Chips f... read more
When Crane died at 28, he was a star: the adventurous veteran of the Wild West and Cuba during the Spanish American War, the author of a masterpiece (The Red Badge of Courage), and an exile ... read more
Catherine was the sister of Christian; in WW2 she worked with the French Resistance but was arrested in 1944 and sent to Ravensbrück. Miraculously she survived, and was awarded both the Cro... read more
Born into an English Catholic family in 1538, she was married into the Spanish Court. After her husband's death she took on the role of unofficial ambassador in Spain, keeping on the good si... read more
Summer, 1865: Dostoevsky was stuck in a Wiesbaden hotel, ill and unable to pay. Combining aspects of his own fix with the story of a notorious Parisian murderer, he wrote a novel that made h... read more
A hotchpotch of journal entries from the last seven years to do with living around Paris, surprisingly free of the angst found in much of her other writing.
One of the great patrons of the Renaissance, creator of perhaps the most remarkable library outside the Vatican, the Duke of Urbino was also the most successful and feared mercenary of the a... read more
Born Elizabeth Forbes in 1912, he lived as a boy/man and had the gender on his birth certificate altered in order to marry. When his older brother died in 1965, his cousin contested Ewan's i... read more
A thorough, readable biography of the Queen's grandfather that seeks to understand how this supposedly dull man navigated the monarchy successfully through a succession of crises.