"I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller's cane, and the pilgrim's staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the wave... read more
The story of the author's 25-year search for 'Agent Piccadilly' - the man who murdered Georgi Markov with a poisoned umbrella on Westminster Bridge in 1978.
From the editor of Gunn's Letters comes the first biography of the poet whose complex sexual and cultural life led him to the California hippies and the AIDS crisis.
A biography of the extraordinary Felix Kersten, a Finnish masseur who was co-opted by Himmler as his physician and used his position to save (it is estimated) 100,000 lives.
It is often supposed that Lovelock was a sort of hippie, but he worked for NASA in the 1960s, then MI5 and MI6; then Shell, whom he warned about the danger to the environment of fossil fuels... read more
Who were 'The Flappers'? A generation of women who broke with social conventions; exotic, often despairing, and influential. By the author of the excellent Tales from the Colony Room: Soho's... read more
Gloriously funny memoir by a Minnesotan food writer about moving to an unpretentious village in the Languedoc with his wife and two aghast children. Hoffman has previously won the James Bear... 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
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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 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
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
He was Churchill's secretary and edited the work of Somerset Maugham and Sassoon; his proteg?s included Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer and many others.
The pursuit of two grandmothers, purged from the author's family history by her Hampstead communist parents: the vicissitudes of genealogy and family politics.