Brought up in late-Victorian Presbyterian Aberdeenshire, McBey became a war artist in WW1. A decade later he married the American Marguerite Loeb and went to live in Tangier, in a house on O... read more
A re-issue of this charming, episodic memoir of the great illustrator's early life, filled with his sketches; he himself called it "an autobiographical fragment". Published here in a pocket... read more
From the author of the best book on Dreyfus, this is a biography of the Indian monk who inspired Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore and introduced Westerners to yoga and the Vedanta.
Schmidt was an Austrian diplomat who served as Foreign Minister 1936-1938. With access to previously unpublished family papers, Bassett shows how this controversial figure in fact tried to m... read more
In 2011 Taseer was kidnapped in Lahore by Taliban-affiliated gunmen; only a few months earlier his father, the governer of the province Punjab, had been murdered. It is thought that Taseer w... read more
Born in Australia, she lived and worked in Hong Kong after WW2 and then for the UN in New York. After marrying the great Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, she lived mostly on Capri. She ... read more
From the engaging author of Lady In Waiting, whose late flowering as a memoirist and author of a pair of deliciously silly thrillers make her a pin-up for so many.
Gyari died in 2018 after a decade as chief negotiator with China over the status of Tibet. His account will be indispensable to anyone wishing to understand that country's modern history.
Painter, explorer, writer, archaeologist and theosophist, Roerich was a key figure for Diaghilev and Stravinsky for whom he designed sets and costumes (including The Rite of Spring). He was ... read more
A short biography of Thomas Linley, the Georgian prodigy who was celebrated - with Mozart - by Burney as "the most promising geniusses of the age". But he died very young.
George Balanchine’s spanned the twentieth century. He was a choreographer who trained in Tsarist St Petersburg and reached the peak of his career in New York during the Cold War. This is m... read more
Born in Victorian Sydney, she was presented at Court to Queen Victoria and then married a Prussian count. The marriage was unhappy, and her subsequent marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother ... read more
Is it to exalt the mountain or the climber that the mountain should be climbed? Or to gain a good vantage point for telling things, pace James Baldwin?
CM has become the supreme chronicler of Italy under Mussolini. Indefatigable and brilliant, she turns her attention now to Mussolini's favourite and influential daughter, who married Count C... read more
The author must presumably be glad to have used an alias on reading Dominic Sandbrook's review in the Sunday Times. An interminable, banal and exploitative account of her two-year affair.
A portrait of the scandalous Oxford club, of which EW was briefly secretary, and looks at the lives of several of his contemporaries too. Seven of them found their way into Brideshead... The... read more
The first biography of the extraordinary writer who died in 2020. An officer in the 9th Lancers, Morris was posted to Trieste in 1945. He was the only journalist to accompany the 1953 Britis... read more
A former editor of The Times Literary Supplement argues that the trajectory of Rome's richest man presents pertinent questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.
A biography of Marguerite Steinheil (1869-1954), who ascended the social ladder in Belle Epoque Paris on the rungs of many lovers, until a night in May 1908 when her husband and mother were ... read more
Born near Lemburg in Galicia - now in Ukraine - the author of The Radetzky March and several other outstanding works died in alcoholic exile on the eve of WW2. This is a powerful account of ... read more
The recent unsealing of Eliot's letters revealed 1,131 written to Emily Hale, an American drama teacher. This careful book also considers the role of Vivienne, Valerie and Mary Trevelyan in ... read more