Books about Writers Archives

Books about Writers

Immense and gorgeously written, this is the first major Baldwin biography in three decades. It uses four of his relationships (set around four locations: Greenwich Village, Paris, the 'Trans... read more

Baldwin: A Love Story

Nicholas Boggs

Hardback
£36.00

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An immense, learned and witty sweep of literature by the editorial director of New York Review Books and the founder of the NYRB Classics series. Frank is terrific company through the centur... read more

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel ...

Edwin Frank

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£12.99

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Considered controversial, Benson's superb diaries were sealed for one hundred years at his death. This selection shows the novelist, poet, don and Eton master to have been an acute and waspi... read more

The Benson Diary

A.C. Benson

Hardback
£60.00

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The novelist's memoir takes him from a rural postwar childhood to boarding school, Fleet Street and fame as the author of Birdsong and many others.

Fires Which Burned Brightly

Sebastian Faulks

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£20.00

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A memoir-of-sorts of her beloved house in Campden Hill Square, home to Fraser since 1957, to Harold Pinter, to her children, and to animals - feline, canine and literary.

The House that Spoke: The History of a Home

Antonia Fraser

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£10.00

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Mansfield wrote some of the best and most enduring stories of the C20th. Woolf declared hers 'was the only writing I was ever jealous of'. This new biography traces her short life (she die... read more

Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life

Gerri Kimber

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£20.00

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Greenblatt's The Swerve was a codex for understanding the Early Modern period. This biography of Kit Marlowe (cobbler's son, playwright, spy) is similarly sprightly and erudite.

Dark Renaissance

Stephen Greenblatt

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£25.00

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Hard to recall that when PM - author of The Snow Leopard, Far Tortuga and other superb books - came to Sandoe's in the '90s, he was regarded almost as a god. An energetic environmental activ... read more

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen

Lance Richardson

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£30.00

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The remarkable 'Decca' was the sister who went booted and spurred to the Spanish Civil War and later joined the Communist Party in the USA. The author of The American Way of Death, she had c... read more

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford ...

Carla Kaplan

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£27.50

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'Me', in case you're wondering, is a cartoonist from California. And yes, this really is a graphic biography of the sisters - and it's sparkling with wit and energy. Delicious.

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me

Mimi Pond

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£25.00

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Alan Breck's glorious entrance into Kidnapped must be the most dramatic appearance of any character in fiction. His creator's all-too-short life was comparably romantic and adventurous. What... read more

Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Leo Damrosch

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£25.00

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Holmes's superb biographies of Shelley and Coleridge were followed by his dazzling study of the Romantic period, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terr... read more

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief ...

Richard Holmes

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£25.00

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When the Hogarth Press published Gorky's book of apercus in 1920, it could hardly have been to greater acclaim: according to Leonard Woolf, 'it makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy... as if one... read more

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev

Maxim Gorky

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£14.99

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By pegging her narrative to White's diary entries of 1781, when White was 60 and still seven years short of publishing The Natural History of Selborne, the miraculously sensitive Uglow rele... read more

A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer ...

Jenny Uglow

Hardback
£25.00

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Holland has written previous good books about his grandfather. In this new magnum opus, he considers not the life but the extraordinary array of legends, mysteries and industries that ensure... read more

After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal

Merlin Holland

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£30.00

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The allure of Catholicism in the C20th. Some were incensed.

Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark

Melanie McDonagh

Hardback
£25.00

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High comedy wrenched from illness and the business of being an acclaimed writer. The latest autofiction from the celebrated and prodigiously inventive writer of Priestdaddy and no one is tal... read more

Will There Ever Be Another You

Patricia Lockwood

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£16.99

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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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£18.99

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When a recluse in old age, the great Egyptian writer started to walk around Cairo in his dreams and found himself here, there, with friends or strangers. In this short, intriguing book, thos... read more

I Found Myself… The Last Dreams

Naguib Mahfouz

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£12.99

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A strange, snooping literary biography - of Proust as well as his masterpiece. Prieur's aim is not so much to chart a life, but to bring it back. His hunt for the man behind the book - via r... read more

Zombie Proust

Jerome Prieur

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£13.99

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First edition. A fine copy in a very good dust jacket - marred only by creases to the lower back of the jacket.

Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T.S.Eliot And Their Circle ...

John Smart

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£60

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Although an academic, the prolific historian was not limited to an ivory tower: he cared about the world, and this biography reflects the difficulty of engaging with its changes.

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs

Adam Sisman

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£35

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Carefully researched and sensitive to the influences of love and location, this is a fine account of the poet's life.

Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy ...

Peter Jeffreys

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£30

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Unravels the myths surrounding Capote's long stint in the Catalan town of Palamos in the 1960s. Guerriero is an agile writer and one of Latin America's foremost journalists, author of A Sim... read more

The Difficult Ghost: Searching for Truman Capote

Leila Guerriero

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£10.99

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The author, who died in 2020 and left this book unfinished, knew Durrell well. Happily, the completed chapters cover the busiest portions of his friend's life: childhood in India, youthful m... read more

Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912-1945 ...

Michael Haag

Hardback
£25

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A second volume of memoir.

Backstage: Stories of a Writing Life

Donna Leon

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£12.99

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An excellent biography of the author of our dangerously funny fourth Cuckoo Press pamphlet The Quest for Lavishes Ghast (1998). She is clearly better known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ... read more

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

Frances Wilson

Hardback
£25

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Shares an editor with the 4-vol Letters of Samuel Beckett

The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume 1: 1944-1963

Dan Gunn

Hardback
£35

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Alice B. Toklas's, to be precise. Picasso thought she had one, hidden under her hat... A contemporary young academic turned private detective is hired to find it. Comic, gripping, and ironic... read more

Bone Horn

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain

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£11.99

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Wittgenstein, the poet and painter David Jones, Simone Weil and others...

The World Within: Why Writers, Artists and Thinkers Retreat ...

Guy Stagg

Hardback
£20

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A scrapbook, a net of ideas, a cabinet of fragments both literary and artistic. The book is a small, stocky, gorgeous work of art. "Wholeness is an impossibility"...

An Archive

Edmund de Waal

Paperback
£28

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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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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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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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£20.00

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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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£20.00

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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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£14.99

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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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£20.00

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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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£12.99

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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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£25.00

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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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£16.00

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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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£25.00

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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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£16.99

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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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£16.99

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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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£25.00

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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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£25.00

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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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£25.00

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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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£25.00

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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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£20.00

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