Born an Austrian, Schulz lived as a Pole and died as a Jew, shot while carrying home a loaf of bread. 60 years after his death, the discovery of his murals generated controversy.
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
The gardens and orchards of Agatha Christie, Walter Scott, Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl; and, further afield, of Twain, Dickinson, Thoreau, Hemingway, Proust, Sand, Tolstoy...
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
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
The 'double life' of the title refers to Eliot's relationship with George Lewes, the married man with whom she lived for nearly a quarter of a century. CC looks at the ways in which this sca... read more
There have been many books on Plath, but this is in fact the first full biography. Sensitive and perceptive, it navigates both the controversies and poetry with skill.
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
Follows up his Young Eliot (2015, pbk £14.99). Draws on all correspondence including the archive with his lover Emily Hale, which remained sealed until 2020.
Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch & Philippa Foot: they got to know one another as Oxford students during WW2, and went on to have huge influence on subsequent decades.
A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.
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.
A vivid novel about Edith Somerville, co-author of the Irish R.M., set against the backdrop of burnings, politics and lawlessness of Ireland in the early 1920s.
Written during lockdown, this is a book by a writer on top of his game. The ostensible subject is endings, last things, work produced in 'late style'... But, this being Geoff Dyer, it's abou... read more
His last book Time of the Magicians was a group biography of Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Cassirer. Here, he looks at four women who created new ways of thinking in the aftermath of... read more
Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more
Thinking and writing about DHL during the pandemic, Feigel found that his ideas affected her own outlook: this is an intriguing blend of biography and memoir.
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 recent unsealing of Eliot's letters revealed 1,131 written to Emily Hale, an American drama teacher. This careful book also considers the role of Vivienne, Valerie and Mary Trevelyan in ... 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.
She was the only writer towards whom Virginia Woolf acknowledged jealousy. Harman is the distinguished biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney and others.
The first biography of this much loved author, bonne vivante, European, and John Sandoe customer, mentored by Aldous Huxley. Hastings' earlier biographical subjects include Somerset Maugham,... read more
Most lives are untidy, and mine is no exception... She made herself a success in Fleet Street when journalism was still a very male domain, edited Elizabeth David and inspired the look - if ... read more
Captures the spirit of the late C18th by looking at JJ’s dinner parties. He was a publisher, bookseller, and a friend of Blake, Wordsworth, Fuseli, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft etc...
Ronald Knox, in his sermon at GKC's funeral, said "All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton", y... 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
"A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one" ...Diane Johnson's sensitive, witty and and intelligent biography of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821-1861), the well-educat... read more
A novel about the harrowing life of the great Russian poetess. She was involved with both Pasternak and Rilke; her daughter died in the Moscow famine; her husband was executed; and she herse... read more
Marius is the distinguished antiquarian bookseller who features in the work of Javier Marias and worked for Bernard Stone and Peter Ellis; also a wide-ranging writer, most recently on Naples... read more
Published last year in the US, this account of the rich in mid-C20th New York, and Capote's multiple betrayals of friendships, is both fascinating and shocking.
From Pliny and Piranesi to Alexander Pope and John Piper: a magnificent wander through ruins with writers, travellers and artists, through their eyes and in their words. Arranged chronologic... read more
The last seven years of Lowell's life, including 'The Dolphin' sonnets controversy, his break up and reconciliation with EH, seen through their letters to each other, Elizabeth Bishop, Caro... read more
Enayat al-Zayyat was a young Egyptian woman whose only novel was published posthumously in 1967. Here, one of Egypt's foremost poets creates a portrait not only of Enayat but of literary an... read more