Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill and Kathleen Harriman all accompanied their fathers to the Yalta Conference. This is an intriguing account of their involvement and influence on events.
Refracts an abusive relationship through a range of genre and fairytale tropes. A haunting work that is part-memoir and part-literary theory.
There is also a paperback edition of this boo... read more
Thirteen essays by the Northcliffe Professor of English at UCL. An entertaining guide that looks at Dickens's choice of names, use of outrageous coincidence, and why he works best when read ... read more
The author of 'The Queen of Whale Key' and 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' has found a new subject with which to amaze us: the case of the 'Croydon Poltergeist' and its investigation by the N... read more
There are those who swear he was a spy, others who insist he was too scatty or essentially lazy to be one. Whatever the truth, he was an exceptional linguist (Iranian, Afghan Persian, Arabic... 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
She was B-J's muse for the last 25 years of his life, but, unlike most of the other Pre-Raphaelite women, she survived into a self-determining life and was friendly with Wilde, Einstein, Asq... read more
Reading this 'novel' is like going to stay with an old uncle, one with lots of stories to tell but nobody to tell them to. Little Keith - as Hitchens used to call Amis - has been waiting for... read more
A biography of the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, a man of devastating attractions on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group who seems to have gone to bed with most of the people he met and then dran... 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
It seems the 'Mrs Burton' (born Ursula Kuczynski) who pedalled around the English countryside in 1942 was a colonel in the Red Army. Her life story is extraordinary.
Zulfikar was executed in 1979; three of his children were murdered. One can understand why the brilliant author Fatima keeps her distance from politics.
Huygens developed the theory of light travelling as a wave, invented the mechanism for the pendulum clock, and discovered the rings of Saturn - via a telescope that he had also invented. His... read more
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