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
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
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'.
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
The 40-year relationship between the prodigious writer and scholar (biographer of Gandhi, amongst other things, and a JS customer) and his original editor at Oxford University Press.
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.
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
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
The author went to Venice in 1957, aged 25, to have fun for a season among the rich and glam. Written with 67 years' hindsight, this memoir is a vivid evocation of a vanished era.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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
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
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
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 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.
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.
A re-issue of Leach's book, first published in 1978. Born in Hong Kong, he later lived for many years in Japan where he trained as a potter; eventually he settled near St Ives, built a Japan... read more
From the publishers of Luncheon magazine, a chic collection of stories, reminiscences and recipes grounded in HC's childhood in Ireland and his time in the Basque country and France, with Pe... read more