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