Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch & Philippa Foot: they got to know one another as Oxford students during WW2, and went on to have huge influence on subsequent decades.
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
A revisionist account by the distinguished historian, which argues that Magellan was less of a hero and more of a treacherous, irresponsible, tyrannical adventurer.
The legendary Russian pianist, friend of Pasternak and other greats, who fell from grace to live precariously on the fringes of Soviet society. EW is the author of fine biographies of Shosta... 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 France to the American Revolution, then back again to join the French Revolution, whose firebrands threw him into prison for five years, whence he emerged to spar with Napoleon. In 1830... 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
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