Published last year in the US, this account of the rich in mid-C20th New York, and Capote's multiple betrayals of friendships, is both fascinating and shocking.
Marius is the distinguished antiquarian bookseller who features in the work of Javier Marias and worked for Bernard Stone and Peter Ellis; also a wide-ranging writer, most recently on Naples... read more
A novel about the harrowing life of the great Russian poetess. She was involved with both Pasternak and Rilke; her daughter died in the Moscow famine; her husband was executed; and she herse... read more
"A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one" ...Diane Johnson's sensitive, witty and and intelligent biography of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821-1861), the well-educat... read more
Originally published in 2 vols (1969 & 1970), this is a hugely welcome reissue of the amazing, rich memoir by the prolific novelist, journalist and political activist, friend of H.G. Wells a... read more
Ronald Knox, in his sermon at GKC's funeral, said "All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton", y... read more
Captures the spirit of the late C18th by looking at JJ’s dinner parties. He was a publisher, bookseller, and a friend of Blake, Wordsworth, Fuseli, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft etc...
The first biography of this much loved author, bonne vivante, European, and John Sandoe customer, mentored by Aldous Huxley. Hastings' earlier biographical subjects include Somerset Maugham,... read more
Most lives are untidy, and mine is no exception... She made herself a success in Fleet Street when journalism was still a very male domain, edited Elizabeth David and inspired the look - if ... read more
She was the only writer towards whom Virginia Woolf acknowledged jealousy. Harman is the distinguished biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney and others.
The 40-year relationship between the prodigious writer and scholar (biographer of Gandhi, amongst other things, and a JS customer) and his original editor at Oxford University Press.
The recent unsealing of Eliot's letters revealed 1,131 written to Emily Hale, an American drama teacher. This careful book also considers the role of Vivienne, Valerie and Mary Trevelyan in ... read more
Looks back to a group of brave women in the later C18th and onwards - at a time when women had no property and no rights: Elizabeth Montagu, who took on Voltaire and won; Catherine Macauley,... read more
Thinking and writing about DHL during the pandemic, Feigel found that his ideas affected her own outlook: this is an intriguing blend of biography and memoir.
Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more
His last book Time of the Magicians was a group biography of Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Cassirer. Here, he looks at four women who created new ways of thinking in the aftermath of... read more
Written during lockdown, this is a book by a writer on top of his game. The ostensible subject is endings, last things, work produced in 'late style'... But, this being Geoff Dyer, it's abou... read more
A vivid novel about Edith Somerville, co-author of the Irish R.M., set against the backdrop of burnings, politics and lawlessness of Ireland in the early 1920s.
The author must presumably be glad to have used an alias on reading Dominic Sandbrook's review in the Sunday Times. An interminable, banal and exploitative account of her two-year affair.
A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.
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.
Follows up his Young Eliot (2015, pbk £14.99). Draws on all correspondence including the archive with his lover Emily Hale, which remained sealed until 2020.