Joan Leigh Fermor's biographer turns to Eddy Sackville-West, Desmon Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys and the unusual salon they created at Long Crichel in Dorset, where Nancy Mitford, Benjam... read more
The title is part of her 1947 New Year's Eve toast. Openly gay, Highsmith was famously beastly to lovers and friends. This new biography traces connections between her complex character and ... read more
Looks closely at nine of his best known poems to see how this lower-middle-class outsider from a dysfunctional family became one of posterity's darlings.
First of a beautifully published pair of LL's famous memoirs: in this we have his lyrical evocation of a childhood in rural England during the years after WW1. Lovely clothbound edition from... read more
The second volume of a beautifully published pair of LL's famous memoirs, in which the young man leaves his beloved village of Slad for London and then walks and busks his way around Spain.... read more
SM's parents were German Jewish refugees; he was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. His maternal aunts concealed their origins too and had very diffe... read more
From being America's most significant ally in the region, Iran suddenly became its greatest adversary: this account, from 1941 onwards, explains how the Shah himself contrived to lose suppor... read more
A panoramic account by the distinguished Harvard historian of five generations of a French provincial family originally from Angouleme, crammed with stories and archival research. ER has a d... read more
'Orientalism', the Barenboim-Said Foundation, the East-West Divan orchestra, 20 honorary degrees, umpteen prizes: there is much to say about this clever, cultivated, humane man.
Mathilde Carre joined the French Resistance in 1940 but was captured by the Germans a year later and betrayed her network. She survived working as as a double agent and then - possibly - a t... read more
In this inspired recreation of her parents' hopes and lives, MW has created a vivid memoir of post-war childhood and adventure in Cairo, Italy and London.
As a young man in Germany, AW's grandfather published Kafka and several other depraved authors whose work the Nazis were keen to burn. He fled in 1933, eventually settling in New York where ... read more
A compelling portrait of the writer and her engagement with her own world. Constructed as a series of essays on art, memory, painting, rank, property, appearance, etc., this is immensely rea... read more
The story of the son of a Parsi-convert vicar near Birmingham who, convicted for mutilating horses and writing threatening letters to the vicar, contacted Conan Doyle to unravel the mystery ... read more
KnD was born in Derry, on the border between the Five Counties and Eire; one parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. This is a remarkable debut that combines memoir, nature writing and th... read more
MS is an outstanding literary voice in contemporary Russia: here she creates a portrait of three Russian-Jewish generations sifted from the detritus in a late aunt's flat. This book is diff... read more