Howard (1907-1987) served as an intelligence officer in WW2 throughout the Italian campaign. He married Lelia Caetani of Ninfa, where Bassani wrote a large part of The Garden of the Finzi Co... read more
Born into an English Catholic family in 1538, she was married into the Spanish Court. After her husband's death she took on the role of unofficial ambassador in Spain, keeping on the good si... read more
Political debate in India is still divided along lines that can be traced to Nehru's ideas and the foundation of the Republic. This assessment of the exchanges and ideological battles betwee... read more
Born Elizabeth Forbes in 1912, he lived as a boy/man and had the gender on his birth certificate altered in order to marry. When his older brother died in 1965, his cousin contested Ewan's i... read more
Teaching at the Royal College of Art from 1948-1975, he had enormous influence on a generation of British artists. He was also a significant artist in his own right, best known for his vivid... read more
Summer, 1865: Dostoevsky was stuck in a Wiesbaden hotel, ill and unable to pay. Combining aspects of his own fix with the story of a notorious Parisian murderer, he wrote a novel that made h... read more
He doesn't just write letters to his very young son, he illustrates them, copiously, in order to draw his son into the world of reading. His sketches of a walk in the wind, of men with umbre... read more
Grounded by Covid like the rest of us, Nooteboom - a tireless explorer of other cultures - withdrew to his house on Menorca. There he wrote this impressionistic non-diary, reflecting on his ... read more
A panorama spanning 150 years and three generations of 'the Rothschilds of the East', written with full access to family documents. Emerging as Jewish refugees from Ottoman Baghdad, their em... read more
A reprint of her sensational 1941 memoir from the frontline of wartime Europe. She wrote from Madrid during the Spanish Civil War; Paris as it fell to the Germans; London during the Blitz: b... read more
A thorough, readable biography of the Queen's grandfather that seeks to understand how this supposedly dull man navigated the monarchy successfully through a succession of crises.
From a working-class English family, Wells blasted off to international fame with The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Tomalin gives a sympathetic account of the remarkable reformer... read more
His father, Ai Qing, was China's most celebrated poet. This epic story of his father's legacy and his own life is a window onto 1000 years of Chinese history. (A new selection of his poems a... read more
A diary of the first hundred days under the strange new regime that were the Covid laws. It is both a record of that time and a meditation on an A-Z of subjects, from Alexandria to Queneau's... read more