Books about Writers Archives

Books about Writers

A lovely copy - as new, in a very good dust jacket.

Cavafy

Robert Liddell

Hardback
£45.00

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Frances Partridge (née Marshall) was regarded in her old age as the last surviving member of the Bloomsbury Group. She was a regular visitor to John Sandoe's in the 1990s. In 1933 she marri... read more

The Diaries of Frances Partridge

Frances Partridge

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£300.00

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Ballard's fiction is among the most prescient and influential of the later C20th. Among his admirers was the novelist Christopher Priest, who had not completed this biography by the time of ... read more

The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard ...

Christopher Priest

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£25.00

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A guide to this complex and influential figure, taking its subtitle from Hannah Arendt's admiration for what she called Benjamin's 'poetical thinking'. A new addition to Yale's magnificent ... read more

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver

Peter E. Gordon

Hardback
£16.99

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A remarkable act of literary reanimation, given that Charlotte burnt most of Emily's papers after her sister's early death. The fruit of much careful research, this is the first biography of... read more

This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Bronte

Deborah Lutz

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£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

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£29.95

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The Polish writer arrived in Buenos Aires with a delegation on the cusp of WW2, and did not rejoin his ship to return to Poland. This slim book recounts his long exile and bohemian life in A... read more

Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina ...

Mercedes Halfon

Paperback
£12.99

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Herself a writer of great distinction, SH was also married to Paul Auster, who died in 2024. This is a memoir of their 43 years together.

Ghost Stories: A Memoir

Siri Hustvedt

Hardback
£22.00

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A first biography of the cavalry officer, journalist, historian and travel writer, who got the news to London about the ascent of Everest in time for QEII's coronation and blazed a trail for... read more

Jan Morris

Sara Wheeler

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£25.00

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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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The summer of 1776, when Swift stayed in Alexander Pope's delightful house in Twickenham, with Pope and John Gay. Each added fuel to their satirical bonfire, from which not only Gulliver eme... read more

The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of GulliverR ...

Hester Grant

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£25.00

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A rich collection of stories, essays and memoir by a writer who has been at the centre of the literary world for an exceptionally long time - her first novel, The Millstone, won the John Lle... read more

The Great Good Places

Margaret Drabble

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£18.99

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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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Proust: The Early Years & The Later Years (2 vols) ...

George D. Painter

Hardback
£75.00

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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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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

Hardback
£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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A reassessment of the cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, best-selling novelist - and Chopin's lover - who scandalised French society and has, argues Sampson, been underestimated ever since.

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand

Fiona Sampson

Hardback
£22.00

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After outstanding books on France and Italy during WW2, and biographies of Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and others, Moorehead has turned to the Italian novelist, playwright and politician who... read more

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Strug ...

Caroline Moorehead

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£25.00

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A wickedly funny literary slasher set around Paris's Shakespeare and Co,. in which prominent writers are the victims of a string of assassinations by a mysterious terrorist group. Cameos fro... read more

Loren Ipsum

Andrew Gallix

Paperback
£9.99

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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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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

Hardback
£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

Hardback
£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

Paperback
£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

Hardback
£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

Hardback
£16.99

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