Secondhand Literary Biography Books

National Geographic Traveller's the best books on European cities, 2019In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway was approaching fifty and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. He travelled for...

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLERLet Dame Judi Dench take you behind the scenes of a life loving the Bard - as she shares her story with, and enduring affection...

Married at sixteen to a man twenty years her senior who spoke no English, she was taken to his ancestral home and estate where she found herself living in the...

An exuberant biography of the life of the iconic photographer and naturalist Peter Beard, whose life and work captured the cultural imagination Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist,...

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...

The childhood and early life memoir of Antonia Fraser, one of our finest narrative historians.Antonia Fraser's magical memoir describes growing up in the 1930s and '40s, but its real concern...

The sole and definitive biography of the greatest living American playwright. Arthur Miller has been delivering powerful drama to the stage for decades with such masterpieces as Death of a...

'Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works...

A Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns...

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...

'Absolutely exquisite . . . a contemporary classic' Dave Eggers'Death in Venice with more sex, more booze, more action.' FTBBC Radio 4 Book of the WeekOstend, 1936: the Belgian seaside...

Vanity Fair, published in serial parts in 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous 'all but at the top of the tree', he told his mother, 'and having a great fight...

Probably no English poet of the 19th century is today so widely read or greatly loved as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet in his lifetime he was almost entirely unpublished, and...

On 3 January 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old "genius"-by his own reckoning-arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made a spectacle of himself in London with his fashion...

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...

POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION refers to a form of navigation Gore Vidal resorted to as a first mate in the navy during World War II. As he says, 'As I...

*THE NO.3 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* 'Raw, compelling, wise and tender' Dolly Alderton'Motherwell is razor-sharp, fearless and wonderful' Adam Kay'Utterly candid and staggeringly good, both as the history of a woman...

Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century. When she died in 1992 at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction...

The biographer - so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts - here comes to the stage.James Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where...

For two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates - including The Earl...

THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR FANS OF JOHN LE CARREJohn le Carre was a defining writer of his time. This enthralling collection letters - written to readers, publishers, film-makers and...

The ecstatic love poems of Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic born more than eight centuries ago, are beloved by millions of readers in America as well as around...

In 2000 the British Library uncovered a cache of letters and a memoir documenting the previously unknown love affair between Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner. Their story of love, conflict...

More than a memoir, My Crazy Century explores the ways in which the epoch and its dominating totalitarian ideologies impacted the lives, character, and morality of Klima's generation. Klima's story...

In his lifetime, David Foster Wallace was lauded by critics and loved by fans. But even to those who had barely read his work, he was something of a cult...

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir,...

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She...

Authoritative biography of cult writer William Burroughs (1914-1997).It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may...

In this memoir of his childhood, O'Driscoll eloquently examines his troubled relationship with his father, whose bullying and mental abuse have affected him profoundly throughout his life. The task the...

'Spike Milligan: His Part in Our Lives' is a unique insight into the late Spike Milligan, one of Britain's best-loved comedians. Containing contributions from his many friends and colleagues, it...

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeShortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography PrizeThe Number One Irish Bestseller 'Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should...

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....

James Lees-Milne (1908-97) - known to friends as Jim - is remembered for his work for the National Trust, rescuing some of England's greatest architectural treasures, and for the vivid...

From the burning of Byron's memoirs, Jane Austen's clipped businesslike manner, and the lucrative controversy caused by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, through to the discovery of the...

TWO LIVES tells the remarkable story of Seth's great uncle and aunt. His great uncle Shanti left India for medical school in Berlin in the 1930s and lodged with a...

A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85,...

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. Good Samaritan Abdulrahman has stayed...

Two magnificent memoirs by Aleksandar Hemon, presented together in a glorious single edition: together they make a major work from one of our major writers.In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells...

'I was fascinated, moved and entertained by every page. This is the kind of book the world needs right now' DONAL RYAN_______________'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are:A close...

'Evocative . . . poignant . . . acute and funny' Observer'The Revival of the Great Lucia Berlin Continues Apace' New York TimesBest known for her short fiction, it was...

*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020**Winner of non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards*'Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should...