Books about Writers Archives

Books about Writers

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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Blowing hot and cold: an intense look at the relationship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, using previously unpublished letters and other sources to explore their closeness and their late...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

Hardback
£20.00

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A biography of the Romanian poet and translator, whose mother tongue was German and who translated Shakespeare's sonnets in the ghetto. He survived imprisonment and forced labour in WW2, mov... read more

Paul Celan: A Life

Anna Arno

Hardback
£29.95

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Like her novels, the author resists definition - and there's more than enough in her mercurial life for Bailey not to cover the same ground as Frances Wilson did in last year's Electric Spar... read more

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark ...

James Bailey

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£20.00

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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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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.

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History ...

Benjamin Balint

Hardback
£23.99

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Four generationsof this remarkable family, not least Thomas Henry Huxley ('Darwin's bulldog') and Aldous.

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family ...

Alison Bashford

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£30.00

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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 Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji an ...

Shrabani Basu

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£20.00

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Brief reflections on Covid and confinement.

House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

Alan Bennett

Hardback
£8.99

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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 Writer’s Garden: How gardens inspired the world’s grea ...

Jackie Bennett

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£30.00

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His fourth collection of brilliant and meticulously kept diaries, this time covering the years 2016-2024.

Enough Said

Alan Bennett

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£25.00

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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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A selection of literary conversations held at the Parisian bookshop over the last decade.

The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews

Adam Biles

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£20.00

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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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Draws on four of his relationships and their associated locations - Greenwich Village, Paris, the 'Transatlantic Years' and Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Humdinging.

Baldwin: A Love Story

Nicholas Boggs

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£30.00

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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

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith ...

Professor Richard Bradford

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This year will be the 70th anniversary of Orwell's death, and there's a lot of doublespeak around. Thank God for Orwell.

Orwell: A Man Of Our Time

Professor Richard Bradford

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He grew up in a Cumbrian market town during the war, living above the pub. Expected to leave school at 15, he won a scholarship to Oxford.

Back in the Day: A Memoir

Melvyn Bragg

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£25.00

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As entertaining as it is fascinating: it turns out the poet's ancestors were quite an act to follow. (He did!)

The Fall of the House of Byron: Scandal and Seduction in Georgian Engl ...

Emily Brand

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£25.00

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

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

Katherine Bucknell

Hardback
£35.00

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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

Paperback
£11.99

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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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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

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life ...

Clare Carlisle

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£25.00

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Wry, chatty, glitzy memoir by the former editor of Vanity Fair, staff writer for Time and Life, and co-creator of Spy. His stable of writers included Christopher Hitchens, Fran Lebowitz and ... read more

When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last ...

Graydon Carter

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£12.99

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This new biography captures how Rilke endeavoured to retain a sense of transcendence within a collapsing world.

Rilke: The Last Inward Man

Lesley Chamberlain

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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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An ingenious novelistic biography by a sharp young author that uses excerpts from the novels to shed light on the writer's life.

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

Alex Christofi

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£20.00

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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.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath ...

Heather Clark

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£30.00

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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

Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides

Paul Clements

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£25.00

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Edited by his son.

A Private Spy: The Letters of John Le Carré 1945-2020 ...

Tim Cornwell

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£30.00

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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.

Eliot After The Waste Land

Robert Crawford

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£25.00

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Patrick Kavanagh putting his large feet clean through the floor of a car and calling it 'the destructive power of the poet'; Flann O'Brien almost killing Kavanagh in a race to hop the wall i... read more

Dead As Doornails

Anthony Cronin

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£12.99

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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.

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life ...

Clare Mac Cumhaill

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£25.00

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A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.

Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova

Leo Damrosch

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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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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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