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
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.
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
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 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 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
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.
The gardens and orchards of Agatha Christie, Walter Scott, Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl; and, further afield, of Twain, Dickinson, Thoreau, Hemingway, Proust, Sand, Tolstoy...
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
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
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
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.
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
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 '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
She was the only writer towards whom Virginia Woolf acknowledged jealousy. Harman is the distinguished biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney and others.
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
Born in Australia, she lived and worked in Hong Kong after WW2 and then for the UN in New York. After marrying the great Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, she lived mostly on Capri. She ... read more
Born in Victorian Sydney, she was presented at Court to Queen Victoria and then married a Prussian count. The marriage was unhappy, and her subsequent marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother ... read more
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.
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
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
Born near Lemburg in Galicia - now in Ukraine - the author of The Radetzky March and several other outstanding works died in alcoholic exile on the eve of WW2. This is a powerful account of ... read more
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
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.
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
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
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.
A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.
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.
Today's pre-eminent author for children is a Fellow of All Souls. Now she turns her scholarly attention to the religious outsider, social disaster, celebrity preacher, establishment darling,... read more