Books about Writers Archives

Books about Writers

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

Frances Wilson

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£25.00

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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.

Notes to John

Joan Didion

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£18.99

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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

Homework: A Memoir

Geoff Dyer

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£20.00

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A memoir of jealousy.

The Possession

Annie Ernaux

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£8.99

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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

I Found Myself… The Last Dreams

Naguib Mahfouz

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£12.99

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A fascinating study of Orwell that looks at the way his attentiveness to everyday matters influenced his work.

A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell

Nathan Waddell

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£22.00

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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

Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent

Iain Pears

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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.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Francesca Wade

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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

Mark Twain

Ron Chernow

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£40.00

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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

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century F ...

Robert Darnton

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£22.95

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'The greatest literary biography of the twentieth century' and its intriguing author.

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker ...

Zachary Leader

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£29.95

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A new edition of the Austentatious academic's primer for her 250th anniversary.

What Matters in Jane Austen?

John Mullan

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£14.99

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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

Didion & Babitz

Lili Anolik

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A memoir from the beloved author of the Booker short-listed Treacle Walker, The Owl Service and other wonders.

Powsels and Thrums: A Tapesty of a Creative Life

Alan Garner

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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

Goethe: His Faustian Life

A. N. Wilson

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£25.00

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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.

Shattered

Hanif Kureishi

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£18.99

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A memoir from the writer in which she explores the muses who have shaped her work: Duras, Colette, Ballard, Rego and others.

The Position of Spoons: and other intimacies

Deborah Levy

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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.

Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing ...

Lucinda Hawksley

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£14.99

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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

Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake: A Compendium of Classic Authors ...

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A superb study of the great poet's early work, and the crisis of identity that caused him to leave England for America.

The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness ...

Nicholas Jenkins

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A year into university and wrestling with religion, Tóibín discovered Baldwin. These essays on freedom, truth and the hidden are wonderfully perceptive and articulate.

On James Baldwin

Colm Toibin

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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.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

Michael Nott

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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

Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843 ...

Giorgio Agamben

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The distinguished novelist tells of the embedded conflict between ambition and restraint in her 1970s upbringing, and of her battle with anorexia.

My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir

Sarah Moss

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A first biography and reassessment of this complex and under-rated writer.

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence

Avril Horner

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£30.00

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A substantial and excellent biography, by the editor of his letters and diaries.

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

Katherine Bucknell

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£35.00

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A delightful work of literary and domestic history about the effect of living in the countryside on the lives, outlook and work of this trio.

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warn ...

Harriet Baker

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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.

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

Ramachandra Guha

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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

Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses

Paula Byrne

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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

Journey from the North

Storm Jameson

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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

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance ...

Ramie Targoff

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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

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement

Susannah Gibson

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Stafford meanders through Britain, recounting her family history and examining those places where landscape meets literature to create a genius loci.

Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape

Fiona Stafford

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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

The Secret Life of John le Carre

Adam Sisman

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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

Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish ...

Francesca Peacock

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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.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

Nicholas Shakespeare

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£30.00

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