Secondhand Literary Biography Books

P. D. James's extraordinary memoir of her early life and time starting out as a novelist, as well as diaries recording her in old age.In this intriguing and very personal...

In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known young novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde in both literature...

In 1994, Anchee Min published Red Azalea, a memoir of growing up during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. It became an international bestseller. Twenty years later, Min returns...

This is the first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize winner and one of the most compelling literary figures of the last fifty years. With great feeling for his...

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...

Critic Kenneth Tynan, the impresario who created "Oh Calcutta", was also an eccentric and connoisseur of cuisine, wine, literature and women. His diaries record a judicious blend of aesthetics, theatre...

A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph,...

Margaret Drabble, herself much influenced by Angus Wilson's writing, traces his early years as a librarian at the British Library, interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at...

'Somerset Maugham? If anybody ever sold their soul to the devil, he did, and with sizzling relish!' Stephen Tennant, in a letter to Hugo Vickers For nearly sixty years Somerset...

GBS was the first great brand - discover how he created this most modern of concepts.The fourth book in the Royal Irish Academy's award-winning 'Judging' series looks at the legacy...

Though in her lifetime only ten of Emily Dickinson's poems were published, her death revealed 1,789 poems, many of them in hand-sewn booklets, secreted in a locked chest. She is...

Available for the first time and collected in one volume, the letters of one of America's most beloved authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder-a treasure trove that offers new and unexpected understanding...

*The Sunday Times bestseller* 'Funny, intimate and honest' Louis Theroux 'Moving and funny. I absolutely loved it' Claudia Winkleman 'Heartbreaking, hilarious, comforting' Marie Claire Dear 2020 - can we just...

'Beautiful, deep, transfixing . . . it will burn a home in your heart' LEMN SISSAY'Essential reading, life-changing' SAMANTHA MORTON'An astonishing piece of work' NIALL GRIFFITHSThe government told a story...

Medicine and literature are the unifying strands in this skilfully wrought tapestry of Irish biographical portraiture. It delineates the pioneering 18th-century Limerick surgeon Sylvester O'Halloran, his contemporary Oliver Goldsmith MD,...

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...

June 1849: Dr William Wilde, passing a wretched hovel in Dublin's Liberties, discovers James Clarence Mangan in a state of indescribable misery and squalor. Aged just 46, the man dubbed...

My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of...

Deborah Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and...

Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all...

'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...

The father fled East Prussia to escape the 1880s pogroms and, as a penniless immigrant boy, hawked newspapers on the streets of Chicago. The son, who lives on Philadelphia's Main...

The extraordinary life of the most notorious adventuress of the Victorian era. How did an Irish Protestant girl, baptized Eliza Gilbert, transform herself into the most famous courtesan of the...

'A brave process of healing and self reconstruction' Observer'Simply one of the best writers working today. Here's to family, to glamour, and to love' Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic...

'Heart-wrenching, heart-warming and heartfelt - Mother Ship is a beautifully crafted, warts-and-all love letter to our wonderful NHS' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt'Our greatest gift to...

'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...

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,...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted...