Catalogue Search Results
Author
Series
Publisher
Sphere
Pub. Date
1982.
Description
The true story of the 20-year correspondence between Helene Hanff, an American writer living in New York, and Frank Doel, the Manager of Messrs Marks and Co., a bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road. The story is told in the couple's letters.
Author
Publisher
Faber & Faber
Pub. Date
2021
Description
American writer Stephen Crane died in 1900 at the age of 28. In his short, intense life, this burning boy wrote a masterpiece, 'The Red Badge of Courage', as well as other novels, short stories, and dispatches from the front of two wars. His adventurous life took him to the Wild West, Mexico, then to Cuba during the Spanish American War - dodging bullets which killed those around him, and suffering shipwreck on his way home. Fleeing America because...
Author
Publisher
Alma Books
Pub. Date
2022
Description
On 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fiancee and his friends, troubled by money worries and broken in body and mind, the young poet launched on his last journey on earth with both a sense of hope and a deep foreboding that his efforts would be in vain....
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
2022
Description
At six years old, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. At sixty-six, Terry had lived a life full of achievements: becoming one of the UK's bestselling writers, winning the Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Following his untimely death from Alzheimer's disease, the mantle of completing Terry's memoir was passed to Rob...
Author
Publisher
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Pub. Date
2022
Description
After the horrors of the First World War, Oxford looked like an Arcadia - a dreamworld - from which pain could be shut out. Soldiers arrived with pictures of the university fully formed in their heads, and women finally won the right to earn degrees. Freedom meant reading beneath the spires and punting down the river with champagne picnics. But all was not quite as it seemed. Boys fresh from school settled into lecture rooms alongside men who had...
Author
Publisher
Apollo
Pub. Date
2022
Appears on list
Description
Roald Dahl was one of the world's greatest storytellers. He conceived his vocation as one as intrepid as that of any explorer and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child's viewpoint throughout his life. He crafted tales that were exotic in scenario, frequently invested with a moral, and filled with vibrant characters that endure in public imagination to the present day. In this biography, Matthew Dennison re-evaluates the received...
Author
Publisher
Tinder Press
Pub. Date
2023
Appears on list
Description
When Rhiannon fell in love with, and eventually married her flatmate, she imagined they might one day move on. But this is London in the age of generation rent, and so they share their home with a succession of friends and strangers while saving for a life less makeshift. The desire for a baby is never far from the surface, but can she be sure that she will ever be free of the anxiety she has experienced since an attack in the street one night? And...
Author
Publisher
Faber & Faber
Description
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father's consent;...
Author
Publisher
Profile Books
Pub. Date
2023
Appears on list
Description
Secrecy came naturally to John le Carre, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades. To keep these relationships secret, he made use of tradecraft that he had learned as a spy: code names and cover stories, cut outs, safe houses and dead letter boxes. Such affairs introduced both...
Author
Publisher
Yale University Press
Pub. Date
c2006
Description
In this biography the author argues that, although Southey's poetry is overshadowed by his fellow 'Lake poets', his other writings were more salient and his political views far more influential than theirs. He was, as Byron conceded, England's 'only existing entire man of letters'.
Author
Publisher
Atlantic Books
Pub. Date
2021
Description
Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died - an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit...
Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Pub. Date
2022
Appears on list
Description
D.H. Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him. History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexual liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in...
Author
Publisher
Macmillan
Pub. Date
2024
Description
Daniel and Alexander arrived in London in the 1830s at a crucial moment of social change. These two idealistic brothers, working-class sons of a Scottish crofter, went on to set up a publishing house that spread radical ideas on equality, science and education across the world. They also brought authors like Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy and Charles Kingsley, and poets like Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti, to a mass audience. No longer would books...
Author
Publisher
Virago
Pub. Date
2022
Appears on list
Description
Vera Brittain is most widely known as the woman who immortalised a lost generation in her haunting autobiography of the Great War, 'Testament of Youth'. This biography - comprehensive and authoritative - confirms her stature as one of the most remarkable women of our time.
19) The diary that changed the world: the remarkable story of Ootto Frank and the diary of Anne Frank
Author
Publisher
Biteback Publishing
Pub. Date
2022
Appears on these lists
Description
When Otto Frank umwrapped his daughter Anne's diary he discovered a side to her that was as much a reveltion to him as it would be to the rest of the world. Today the diary is at the centre of a multi-million pound industry with competing foundations, cultural critics and former friends and family fighting for the right to control it.