Rebanks inherited his grandfather's farm in the hills of the Lake District and became a sheep farmer, developing a fine flock of Herdwicks. The first part of that story he told, to great ac... read more
A hardback edition of this memoir of an Anglo-Irish woman married to a German lawyer and her experiences of living in Germany during WW2. A classic, and should be given to all who don't know... read more
Brought up in North Carolina in the Jim Crow era, AT won a postgraduate scholarship to Brown University, worked at Warhol's Factory and volunteered for Diana Vreeland. He went on to become e... read more
The marvellous Attlee takes us on the journey, through space and time, of one violin, whose voice "was powerful enough to unbuckle joints". Cremona, Russia, Venice, Alpine forests... (Her la... read more
This epic tale of the Sassoons and the Kadoories in 1930s Shanghai is like 'Dynasty' transferred from Texas to the global stage of China-Baghdad-London in the 1930s.
NB Publ... read more
The author's German grandparents were 'Mitlaufer' - those who went with the flow in the Third Reich. They just wanted to forget, to bury it all under the wreckage... In this fascinating book... read more
The author's ancestors made their fortunes through slaves and sugar. The fortune was lost but the letters were preserved: this is a powerful investigation of an Imperial past which is widely... read more
She went from socialite to pariah when she married George III's sixth son in 1793, without the King's permission. Her children were declared illegitimate, the family scorned: this is a movin... read more
Indiscreet, independent, and funny, Swire roams from Budleigh Salterton to state banquets at Buckingham Palace... As the daughter of Sir John Nott and wife of a former Chairman of the Conser... 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
SM's parents were German Jewish refugees; he was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. His maternal aunts concealed their origins too and had very diffe... read more
As a young man in Germany, AW's grandfather published Kafka and several other depraved authors whose work the Nazis were keen to burn. He fled in 1933, eventually settling in New York where ... read more
A group biography of five women at Oxford in the early C20th who pioneered the study of remote communities in Siberia, Egypt, New Mexico and Easter Island. The women were Katherine Routledge... read more
A valuable reminder of the remarkable rise and achievements of the uneducated orphan farm boy who became Minister of Labour during WW2, and one of the prime architects of West Germany, NATO ... read more
Cairncross differed from the other Cambridge spies in his political outlook and motivation; he didn't work closely with any of them. Suspected as the 'Fifth Man', his identity was confirmed ... 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