Secondhand Literary Biography Books

Flamboyant and witty, Oscar Wilde was famous for being famous. The toast of late-nineteenth London society, he once boasted he could speak spontaneously on any subject, and his writings were...

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...

"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (1933-1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was...

'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...

Told with Clive James's unassailable sense of humour and self-effacing charm, Unreliable Memoirs is a hilarious and touching introduction to the story of a national treasure. A million-copy bestseller, this...

Arthur Miller's life spans more than four decades and includes three marriages - famously to America's enduring icon, Marilyn Monroe - numerous plays, novels and an autobiography. Martin Gottfried utilizes...

'An absolute gem . . . I was delightfully lost by the river throughout' Paul Whitehouse'Marvellous . . . The Catch leaves both its writer and its reader wonderfully "lost...

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...

The grandson of biologist T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background and was educated at Eton and Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having...

Love, Nina meets Black Books: a wry and hilarious account of life in Scotland's biggest second-hand bookshop and the band of eccentrics and book-obsessives who work there'The Diary Of A...

ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016'A deeply original and illuminating account of Marx's journey through the intellectual history of the nineteenth century... a profound reappraisal and a gripping read' Christopher...

Hailed by Virginia Woolf and many others as the all-time great letter writer, Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, is not as well known today as she should be....

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...

When it was announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new GBP10 note in 2017, few were aware that a GBP10 Austen banknote already existed - issued by her...

'DREAM HOLIDAY READING....I ENJOYED LEAMER'S BOOK A LOT.' SUNDAY TIMES'ABSOLUTELY PERFECT POOLSIDE READING AND I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE MINI-SERIES.' THE TIMES'BARRELING AND WELL-RESEARCHED.' MAIL ON SUNDAY'A JUICY, ENGAGING READ.'...

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...

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...

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...