Literary Biography

When Stephen Ambrose became interested in American history at age 18, there was much that America had done that made him proud, but there were many things he condemned as...

This is the story of an extraordinary boy with a brilliant mind, a heart of gold and a tortured soul.' From the day he was born, Nick Traina was his...

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian....

In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi wa Thiong'o paints a mesmerising portrait of a young boy's experiences in an African nation in flux. Beginning in the late 1930s,...

WINNER OF THE 2020 CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONChosen as one of Barack Obama's favourite books of 2019'A triumph...

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him.' Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on...

This biography is the culmination and distillation of 20 years' work on Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), the author who remains best known for "A Clockwork Orange", the source for Stanley Kubrick's...

Lessons in living from the bestselling and beloved author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGSA brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMAThe woman...

'This is a marvellous, endlessly illuminating book ... It doesn't go on the shelf alongside other critics; it goes on the shelf alongside Dickens' Howard Jacobson___________________Discover the tricks of a...

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. All of his 47 novels have been printed - two of which have been made into TV series, "The...

Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world...

A continuous text made up of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and a selection of her brother's poems. Dorothy Wordsworth kept her Journal 'because I shall give William pleasure by...

This is the never-before-told story of George Orwell's first wife, Eileen, a woman who shaped, supported, and even saved the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.In 1934,...

Maya Angelou's volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she...

Alastair Cooke's Letter from America: 1946-2004 is a defining collection from his legendary BBC Radio broadcasts that guides us through nearly sixty years of changing life in the United States....

'Hot damn! Let us rumble, keep going and don't slow down ... let's have a little fun ...'In his much-anticipated memoir, Hunter S. Thompson looks back on a long and...

George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in,...

The definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's finest poets, Siegfried Sassoon combines material from The Making of a War Poet and The Journey from the Trenches, the two...

Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Bronte's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic...

Laure Adler contacted Marguerite Duras in the 1970s after finding consolation from one of her novels after the death of her child, and they became friends. Years later, she became...

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenaged - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America...

Written with a mixture of memoir and dramatic stories, this text is an exploration into what it means to be a wife, particularly a "good wife", then and now, looked...

John Keats died at an early age, leaving what have become some of the best-known English poems, such as "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to a Grecian Urn", "Ode to...

The 19th-century explorer Richard Burton was a blend of erudite scholar and daring adventurer. Fluent in 29 languages, he found it easy to pass himself off as a native, thereby...

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was one of the most glamorous international publishers of his generation, yet he died violently, as a member of an ultra-left group attempting to blow up an electricity...

A brilliant and feared critic, Kenneth Tynan was a nabob of the National Theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and he was also the daring impresario who created "Oh Calcutta". He was...

Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"; travelled to revolutionary France and...

Many know the public Yeats but few have managed to penetrate to the inner man, or to explore the relationship with his much younger wife, George. Here Brenda Maddox brings...

Maya Angelou's five volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman...

Maya Angelou's six volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman...

Clinging to the Wreckage - the first part of John Mortimer's hilarious and moving autobiography'A true masterpiece of the genre' The TimesHere John Mortimer recounts his solitary childhood in the...

Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot was one of the most influential works for the post-World War II generation, has long been identified with the debilitated and impotent characters...

A deluded mother who invented her past, an alcoholic father who couldn't deal with the present, a son who wondered if this could really be his family. Richard Glover's favourite...

Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's is a poignant family memoir offering a portrait of his parents' marriage and recalling his Leeds childhood, Christmases with Grandma Peel, and the...

A Guardian Book of the YearAn Evening Standard Book of the YearAn Independent Book of the Year Netgalley's non-fiction Book of the YearA national treasure's journey to the brink and...

A The Times & Sunday Times Book of the Year'Fascinating... Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing' Sunday Times'Gripping... A story well told.' New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for...

Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, was also perhaps the outstanding poet to have written in English since Wordsworth.Many of his early poems - wistful, mysterious and suffused with Pre-Raphaelite...

In Uncle Tungsten Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow...