Books about Writers Archives

Books about Writers

The public image of an Edwardian lady of leisure was an illusion: LW shows that she was a dynamic, pioneering, working woman.

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman

Lucy Worsley

Hardback
£25.00

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Photo-essays of 38 writers from Atwood (working in her garden) to Murakami and Zadie Smith.

The Writers: Portraits

Laura Wilson

Hardback
£30.00

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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 ...

Hardback
£12.99

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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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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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Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Cunard and others.

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Following Writers and Rebels in the Spani ...

Sarah Watling

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£22.00

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STW described this as "a strange love story between an old woman and a dead man". First published in 1967.

T H White: A Biography

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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£13.99

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Literary editor, reviewer, pundit... Walsh was closely involved with the vibrant literary scene of the '80s.

Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World ...

John Walsh

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£25.00

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Mecklenberg Square in Bloomsbury with Virginia Woolf, H.D., Dorothy L Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison and economic historian Eileen Power.

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars ...

Francesca Wade

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£20.00

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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 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

Hardback
£22.00

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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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First publication of the American poet's private diaries from adolescence to middle age.

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay ...

Edna St Vincent Millay

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£25.00

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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

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£25.00

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EW brings together the diaries, letters and pictures left by the MT, with whom Eliot had a 20-year friendship that did not develop as she anticipated.

Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story

Mary Trevelyan

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A compelling portrait of the writer and her engagement with her own world. Constructed as a series of essays on art, memory, painting, rank, property, appearance, etc., this is immensely rea... read more

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

Sylvana Tomaselli

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£25.00

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A version of this was published in 1991. This new edition contains a further 150 letters.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien

Hardback
£30.00

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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

Hardback
£16.00

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A Persephone reprint of the two books by HT recounting her marriage with the poet Edward Thomas.

As It Was and World Without End

Helen Thomas

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£16.00

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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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£25.00

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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

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£20

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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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A skilful, moving ‘jeu d’esprit‘ turns about the life of the poet, the nature of his work, and the author’s preoccupation with him over several decades. It contains as much fiction a... read more

Being Betjeman(n)

Jonathan Smith

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This skilful, moving jeu d'esprit could just as well be in the fiction section. It's about both the poet and the author's preoccupation with him, and contains as much fiction as fact. If you... read more

Being Betjeman

Jonathan Smith

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£9.99

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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

Hardback
£60

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A biographical account of Eliot's troubled first wife, presented alongside her writings. Married to T.S. Eliot in 1915, their marriage lasted until about 1933. Her circle included Ottoline M... read more

The Fall of a Sparrow: Vivien Eliot’s Life and Writings ...

Ann Pasternak Slater

Hardback
£35.00

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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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£16.99

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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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Shapiro's light touch never undermines his scholarship. Who knew that Shakespeare could be so controversial in the C21st?

Shakespeare in a Divided America

James Shapiro

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£20.00

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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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An illuminating account of the troubled writer, which gives unusual emphasis to her Caribbean background.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys ...

Miranda Seymour

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£25.00

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With considerable humility, this book is subtitled In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life. Actually it's the brilliant Saunders' own work, distilled from deca... read more

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

George Saunders

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£10.99

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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

Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Katherine Rundell

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An incisive post-mortem on the state of the Victorian union, told (with a gossipy thrill) through the lives of five couples - Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, John Ruskin and Effie Gray, Charl... read more

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

Phyllis Rose

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£11.99

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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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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

Paperback
£13.99

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