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.
Ambassador for Henry VIII, Lord Protector of Edward VI, queen-maker and marriage broker for Mary, Paget continued to wield influence at Elizabeth I's court. He kept his head - by a whisker -... read more
Mozart was taken to Italy three times by his father in his early and mid-teens; already astonishingly accomplished as a thirteen-year-old, he drank in Italian opera like a thirsty man findin... read more
Xi Jinping is head of the CCP, head of state and commander-in-chief of the military, with an indefinite period in office; he's centralised power, increased state control of the economy and i... read more
The memoirs of Henry 'Bunter' Somerset - rock singer and songwriter, formerly the Marquess of Worcester, now the 17th Duke of Beaufort and the owner of Badminton House.
An account of Edward VIII that looks at early drafts of the abdicated King's own writings, and counterbalances the recent tabloid view of him as a traitor.
Our former Prime Minister considers Hillsborough, Grenfell and many parliamentary scandals, arguing that time and again those in power have served their own interests or those of the organi... read more
Johan Jakob Astor left Germany for a flute-making business in London in the late C18th, and then moved to New York where he dealt in pianos, opium, furs and real estate: what glistered was i... read more
A multi-generational story of the remarkable Swedish family who made their fortune in Russia (founding the Russian oil industry) and then moved back to Sweden in 1917.
Prominent in both Thatcher and Major's cabinets, the author is a shrewd observer of the corridors of power, with their surprising chicanes and U-turns.