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.
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...
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
She was the only writer towards whom Virginia Woolf acknowledged jealousy. Harman is the distinguished biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney and others.
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