Secondhand Literary Biography Books

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...

Every now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any...

'I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will it make a jot of...

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...

On 25 February 1956, twenty-three-year-old Sylvia Plath walked into a party and immediately spotted Ted Hughes. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship have dominated the cultural landscape to such...

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on...

'IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners' Kaveh Akbar, author of...

William Wordsworth's creative collaboration with his 'beloved Sister' spanned nearly fifty years, from their first reunion in 1787 until her premature decline in 1835. Rumours of incest have surrounded the...

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...

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...

In this much anticipated addition to the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet...

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...

The first of two volumes of the letters of Muriel Spark, one of the greatest and most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.*One of the TLS Books of the Year...

'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs . . .'So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old...

This biography of Evelyn Waugh traces the career of a writer who, though respected, was always controversial and undoubtedly eccentric. In particular it focuses on his difficult relationship with his...

The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my...

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...

One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in south-east...

Writing with unique access to his memories and his private papers, and with great love for his formidable body of work, Patrick French brings us unique and often surprising insights...

Nancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Anais Nin said 'I think often of Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a...

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, were life-long friends. They were also the daughters of best friends: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic...

The enormous popular appeal of Philip Larkin's poetry has long been established; but oddly little is known to his admiring public about the personality behind the work.The Selected Letters will...

'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...

Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee are respectively responsible for some of the great contemporary works of fiction: Auster's The New York Trilogy or Coetzee's Disgrace are only two of...

Nora Ephron meets Bram Stoker in Sophie White's vivid and ambitious literary non-fiction collection. White asks uncomfortable questions about the lived reality of womanhood in the 21st century, and the...

Forty years after Pablo Neruda's death, his poetry continues to be read all over the world. His range is vast: from the lyricism of Twenty Love Poems and a Song...

In the spring of 1895 the life of Constance Wilde changed irrevocably. Up until the conviction of her husband, Oscar, for homosexual crimes, she had held a privileged position in...

A Daily Telegraph, Times, Evening Standard, TLS and Spectator Book of the Year.Winner of the Hawthornden Prize.Edward Lear is well-loved for his 'nonsenses', from joyous limericks to great love songs,...