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
Dorothy Dean was one of the few African American women of the New York 60s underground scene. She starred in six of Andy Warhol's films. Patti Smith calls her 'small, black and brilliant,' i... 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
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.
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
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