An entertaining group-biog of the American babes who inherited money and married titles. The usual line-up: Mary Davies (Grosvenor), Consuelo Vanderbilt (Marlborough); Singer, Fellowes, de J... read more
The Director of the V&A looks at how the great ceramicist and Lunar man transformed society by creating an early form of international mass market, while also significantly contributing to t... 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
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
When the author's mother dies, leaving a strangely symbolic collection of everyday objects behind her, Wicha begins to sort through the belongings and constructs a minute, material history b... read more
Newly explored archives reveal that the post-Abdication lives of this pair were fraught with treachery and lurid affairs to a degree that astonishes even their many detractors. The author of... read more
A deeply affecting memoir of coming of age in Albania - the last outpost of Stalinism in Europe. Tracing the transition in 1990 from repression, food shortages and political executions to po... read more
The intriguing, gin-soaked tale of the affair between the Cambridge spy Kim Philby and the glamorous American Eleanor Brewer, set against the backdrop of a louche, radical 1950s' Beirut, and... 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 biography of Thomas Kendrick (1881-1972), the British spy who created intelligence networks across Europe, facilitated the escape of Austrian Jews and set up a listening operation known as... read more
A moving and unique coming-of-age diary written by Churchill's daughter Mary during WW2 which shows her father as PM, military leader and family man. Carefully edited by ES, Churchill's gran... read more
Begins with a Perec epigraph: "De l'autobus, je regarde Paris" - and Elkin does, in a diary of vignettes about the 'infra-ordinary' (Perec again): fellow commuters, a diversion, a girl with ... read more
The Booker Prize winner reflects on her long journey to literary fame, and how her personal experience is bound up in Britain's complex racial and colonial past.
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
That venerable and dedicated historian of ancient India travelled half a century ago to northern and north-western China to work at the cave sites of Maijishan and Dunhuang; based on her dia... read more