This is the journal Didion wrote in 1999 detailing her sessions with a psychiatrist. They concern her work, her daughter and her own childhood and parents.
Dyer was born in Cheltenham in the late fifties. Mother was a dinner lady, father was a planning engineer. His reflections on growing up in England during the '50s are characteristically tho... read more
When a recluse in old age, the great Egyptian writer started to walk around Cairo in his dreams. In this fascinating book, those dreams are layered with reflections on Egypt and the world. B... read more
Larissa Salmina was a wild child of the USSR who rose to be Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage; Francis Haskell was a distinguished, deracinated Cambridge art historian. They met in... read more
The author of Square Haunting tackles another giant of modernism - the sibyl of Montparnasse, l'ogresse de la rue du Fleurus - with intelligence, wit and access to new material.
A hefty, authoritative tome on the great writer whose earliest career was as a pilot on the Mississippi. Chernow is the author of several substantial North American pillars including Hamilto... read more
Radicals, decadents, hacks, censors, printers, spies and patrons in the French Enlightenment and Revolution. The distinguished historian's previous book was The Revolutionary Temper: Paris,... read more
Blowing hot and cold: an intense look at the relationship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, using previously unpublished letters and other sources to explore their closeness and their late... read more
ANW is an astonishing author. His prodigious output is of an exceptionally high quality. Besides novels and works of history, he has now written several excellent biographies (Tolstoy, Milto... read more
A walk that led to a fall that left the writer without the use of his arms and legs in 2022: a remarkable memoir by the author of My Beautiful Launderette and much else.
The man who walked everywhere spent a year in Italy with his family, and later lived in Paris and Switzerland; he travelled to America and Canada too. By his great-great granddaughter.
Du Maurier's sloe gin, Ginsberg's borscht, Orwell's plum cake = purple recipes, if not prose. Recipes by many others, including Isherwood, Kerouac and Didion, introduced by Queen Bee. Intrig... read more
A year into university and wrestling with religion, Tóibín discovered Baldwin. These essays on freedom, truth and the hidden are wonderfully perceptive and articulate.
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.
For his first 36 years, Hölderlin engaged with the world. The second half of his life - the subject of this book, by the celebrated European philosopher - was spent as a 'madman' in the hom... read more
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
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
Looks back to a group of brave women in the later C18th and onwards - at a time when women had no property and no rights: Elizabeth Montagu, who took on Voltaire and won; Catherine Macauley,... read more
The subject's death released the official biographer from the prohibition against writing about Le Carr?'s private life. Hence this second book from Sisman. Not to be confused with Suleika D... read more
Cavendish - the Duchess of Newcastle - was attached to the exiled court of Henrietta Maria when she published her amazing proto-sci-fi novel, The Blazing World. A clever and subtle debut bio... read more
Fleming's own ideal of the 'complete man' is the source for the subtitle. NS has left no stone unturned in pursuit of a 'complete' portrait in writing this immense and engaging biography.