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
Recently outed as 'Deep Miaow', we understand that Larry, the Downing Street cat, has been an important source helping Gimson with his researches. Clearly a descendant of Tobermory.
Already known to many as the author of the superb black comedy Death and the Penguin and others, Kurkov - a Russian-born Ukrainian - has recently been a tireless commentator on the Russian i... 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.
After her adventures with Bonnie Prince Charlie in the aftermath of Culloden, Flora MacDonald emigrated to North Carolina, married, and got caught up in the War of Independence. This is an a... 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
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
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
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 With access to previously unpublished family papers, Bassett shows how this controversial figure in fact tried to m...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
Barbara Cartland's daughter, Princess Diana's stepmother, who is said to left the Althorp estate with just a few bin bags of clothes. She was irrepressible, controversial - and perfectly man... read more
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
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
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.
The novelist, historian and biographer morphs with supreme elegance into a memoirist, borne along by his gifts of intelligence, wit, culture and scrutiny.