Although today William Blake (1757-1827) is recognised as a visionary poet and artist, at the time of his death he was unknown except for his presumed insanity. This highly influential two-volume biography by the barrister Alexander Gilchrist, first published in 1863 and reissued here in its second edition (1880), rescued William Blake from almost complete obscurity. The accepted interpretation of his madness was challenged and his creative talents were brought to the attention of Victorian society by the inclusion of selected writings and artistic works, nearly all previously unpublished. Volume 1 of Gilchrist's book is an account of William Blake's life, combining excerpts from his written works and paintings with detailed biographical information drawn from surviving letters and contemporary accounts.

'An absolute belter of a biography' MARINA HYDE A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022 An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic 'Rhys woman' whose personality - vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry - was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait. Many details of Rhys's life emerge from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout her long and challenging career. But it's a shock to discover that no biographer - until now - has researched the crucial seventeen years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of Dominica; the island which haunted Rhys's mind and her work for the rest of her life. Luminous and penetrating, Seymour's biography reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil - and yet was never a victim. I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a fascinatingly elusive woman. The figure who emerges for Seymour is powerful, cultured, self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable and often darkly funny. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.

At the end of the 1970s, Manchester seemed to be sliding into the dustbin of history. Today the city is an international destination for culture and sport, and one of the fastest-growing urban regions in Europe. This book offers a first-hand account of what happened in between. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine City Life before working for the Manchester Evening News and creating his own PR firm. In a forty-year career he has encountered a who's who of Manchester personalities, from cultural icons such as Tony Wilson to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and influential council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein. His remarkable account traces Manchester's gradual emergence from its post-industrial malaise, centring on the legendary nightclub the Hacienda and the cultural renaissance it inspired. Manchester unspun begins in the gloom of a city still bearing the scars of the Second World War and ends among the shiny towers of an aspiring twenty-first-century metropolis. It is an insider's tale of deals done, government and corporate decision-making, nightclubs, music and entrepreneurs. -- .

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 1 covers the period to 1860, the year in which the final volume of Modern Painters was published.

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 2 covers the period from 1860 to Ruskin's death in 1900, and includes an index to both volumes.

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential magazine Commentary. As both an editor and a writer, he spearheaded the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and - after he 'broke ranks' - the neoconservative response. For years he defined what was at stake in the struggle against communism; recently he has nerved America for a new struggle against jihadist Islam; always he has given substance to debates over the function of religion, ethics, and the arts in our society. The turning point of his life occurred, at the age of forty near a farmhouse in upstate New York, in a mystic clarification. It compelled him to 'unlearn' much that he had earlier been taught to value, and it also made him enemies. Revealing the private as well as the public man, Thomas L. Jeffers chronicles a heroically coherent life.

OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Shakespeare and Biography is not a new biography of Shakespeare. Instead, it is a study of what biographers have said about Shakespeare, from the first formal biography in the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe to Stephen Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, Germaine Greer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Park Honan, Rene Weis, and others who have written recent biographical accounts of England's greatest writer. The emphasis is on what sort of issues these biographers have found especially interesting in relation to sex and gender, politics, religion, pessimism, misanthropy, jealousy, aging, family relationships, the end of a career, the end of life. How has Shakespeare's contemplation of these issues changed and grown, and in what ways do those changes reflect new cultural developments in our world as it continues to reinterpret Shakespeare?

George Orwell left post-war London for Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, to write what became Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was driven by a passionate desire to undermine the enemies of democracy and make plain the dangers of dictatorship, surveillance, doublethink and censorship. Typing away in his damp bedroom overlooking the garden he curated and the sea beyond, he invented Big Brother, Thought Police, Newspeak and Room 101 - and created a masterpiece. Barnhill tells the dramatic story of this crucial period of Orwell's life. Deeply researched, it reveals the private man behind the celebrated public figure - his turbulent love life, his devotion to his baby son and his declining health as he struggled to deliver his dystopian warning to the world.

First published in 1836, this lively two-volume autobiography of Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) reveals the background and mindset of this fascinating character. Best-known for helping to stimulate interest in bibliography and for his enthusiasm in promoting book collecting among the aristocracy, the English bibliographer adopts a conversational and anecdotal tone as he shares the details of his life and work with the reader. Volume 1 begins with the history of his parents, who died when Dibdin was very young. Dibdin then describes his formative years at school and college and the beginning of his professional life, including being ordained as a priest, before moving on to discuss his publications in some detail. Drawing upon letters and literature throughout, Dibdin recounts many entertaining tales, including an unfortunate encounter with a 'savage-hearted critic' at a dinner party, and introduces the influential characters he meets along the way.

In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses and humble realisations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Weaving together the voices that shaped her, Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, the teachings of a changing earth and the poets who paved her way. She explores her grief at the loss of her mother and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife and community member. Moving fluidly among prose, song and poetry, Poet Warrior is a luminous journey of becoming that sings with all the jazz, blues, tenderness and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.

In 2005, Anne Rice startled her readers with her novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," and by revealing that, after years as an atheist, she had returned to her Catholic faith."
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana" followed.
And now, in her powerful and haunting memoir, Rice tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.
She begins with her girlhood in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. She describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life.
She writes about her years in radical Berkeley, where her career as a novelist began with the publication of "Interview with the Vampire," soon to be followed by more novels about otherworldly beings, about the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, each reflecting aspects of her often agonizing moral quest.
She writes about loss and tragedy (her mother's drinking; the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice); about new joys; about the birth of her son, Christopher; about the family's return in 1988 to the city of New Orleans, the city that inspired so much of her work. She tells how after an adult lifetime of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and consecration to Christ that lie behind her most recent novels.
For her readers old and new, this book explores her continuing interior pilgrimage.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award

'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming – a delicious celebration of love and life' Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of Rain

In 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell set sail for Rome, a city that would prove to be a place of inspiration and love: she would make enduring friendships, and meet a man - Charles Norton - who would become the love of her life.

In 2013, Nell Stevens is writing about Mrs Gaskell in Rome, and falling drastically in love with a man who lives in another city altogether. As Nell chases her heart around the world, and as Mrs Gaskell forms the greatest connection of her life, these two women, though centuries apart, are drawn together, and for Nell, Mrs Gaskell becomes more than a figure from the past. Here is a confidante, a friend, a woman who - living outside the conventions of her time - might have some wisdom to offer Nell.

Mrs Gaskell and Me is about unrequited love and the romance of friendship, it is about forming a way of life outside the conventions of your time, and it offers Nell the opportunity – even as her own relationship falls apart – to give Mrs Gaskell the ending she deserved.

Published posthumously in 1964, "A Moveable Feast" remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most enduring works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.
Featuring a personal Foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an Introduction by grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, editor of this edition, the book also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son, Jack, and his first wife Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford, and insightful recollections of Hemingway's own early experiments with his craft.
Widely celebrated and debated by critics and readers everywhere, the restored edition of "A Moveable Feast "brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after ?World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.

The first book to portray one of the most remarkable friendships in American letters, that of Emily Dickinson--recluse, poet--and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister, literary figure, active abolitionist.
Their friendship began in 1862. The Civil War was raging. Dickinson was thirty-one; Higginson, thirty-eight. A former pastor at the Free Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, he wrote often for "the" cultural magazine of the day, "The" "Atlantic Monthly"--on gymnastics, women's rights, and slavery. His article "Letter to a Young Contributor" gave advice to readers who wanted to write for the magazine and offered tips on how to submit one's work ("use black ink, good pens, white paper").
Among the letters Higginson received in response was one scrawled in looping, difficult handwriting. Four poems were enclosed in a smaller envelope. He deciphered the scribble: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
Higginson read the poems. The writing was unique, uncategorizable. It was clear to him that this was "a wholly new and original poetic genius," and the memory of that moment stayed with him when he wrote about it thirty years later.
Emily Dickinson's question inaugurated one of the least likely correspondences in American letters--between a man who ran guns to Kansas, backed John Brown, and would soon command the first Union regiment of black soldiers, and the eremitic, elusive poet who cannily told him she did not cross her "Father's ground to any House or town."
For the next quarter century, until her death in 1886, Dickinson sent Higginson dazzling poems, almost one hundred of them--many of them her best. Their metrical forms were unusual, theirpunctuation unpredictable, their images elliptical, innovative, unsentimental. Poetry torn up by the roots, Higginson later said, that "gives the sudden transitions."
Dickinson was a genius of the faux-naif variety, reclusive to be sure but more savvy than one might imagine, more self-conscious and sly, and certainly aware of her outsize talent. "Dare you see a Soul at the 'White Heat'?" she wondered. She dared, and he did.
In this shimmering, revelatory work, Brenda Wineapple re-creates the extraordinary, delicate friendship that led to the publication of Dickinson's poetry. And though she and Higginson met face-to-face only twice (he had never met anyone "who drained my nerve power so much," he said), their friendship reveals much about Dickinson, throwing light onto both the darkened door of the poet's imagination and a corner of the noisy century that she and Colonel Higginson shared.
"White Heat" is about poetry, politics, and love; it is, as well, a story of seclusion and engagement, isolation and activism--and the way they were related--in the roiling America of the nineteenth century.

A complete account of the life and times of James Joyce in the form of a graphic novel. From his earliest days and school career, through to meetings with all the literary greats of the day, this story is dotted with anecdotes, as well as a captivating and beautifully drawn journey through the cities of Dublin, Trieste, Paris and Zurich, where this universal Irishman left traces of his life. A stunning one-of-a-kind publication about Joyce's life.

Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600 81) is Spain's most important early modern dramatist. His varied career as a playwright, courtier, soldier and priest placed him at the heart of Spanish culture, and he reflected on contemporary events in his plays, most famously La vida es sueno (Life is a Dream). In this 2009 scholarly biography of Calderon in English, Don Cruickshank uses his command of the archival sources and his unparalleled understanding of Calderon's work to chart his life and his political, literary and religious contexts. In addition, the book includes much fresh research into Calderon's writings and their attributions. This elegant, erudite work will bring Calderon to a new audience both within and beyond Spanish studies. With illustrations, extensive notes and a detailed index, this is the most comprehensive English-language book on Calderon, and it will long remain the key work of reference on this important author.

’I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream. Actually, I can’t remember us speaking at all. Maybe because we never did.’

The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is one of the strangest creatures nature ever created. Remarkably little is known about the eel, even today. What we do know is that it’s born as a tiny willow-leaf shaped larva in the Sargasso Sea, travels on the ocean currents toward the coasts of Europe – a journey of about four thousand miles that takes at least two years. Upon arrival, it transforms itself into a glass eel and then into a yellow eel before it wanders up into fresh water. It lives a solitary life, hiding from both light and science, for ten, twenty, fifty years, before migrating back to the sea in the autumn, morphing into a silver eel and swimming all the way back to the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds and dies.

And yet . . . There is still so much we don’t know about eels. No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one can give a complete account of the eel’s metamorphoses or say why they are born and die in the Sargasso Sea; no human has even seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Ever. And now the eel is disappearing, and we don’t know exactly why.

What we do know is that eels and their mysterious lives captivate us.

This is the basis for The Gospel of the Eels, Patrik Svensson’s quite unique natural science memoir; his ongoing fascination with this secretive fish, but also the equally perplexing and often murky relationship he shared with his father, whose only passion in life was fishing for this obscure creature.

Through the exploration of eels in literature (Günter Grass and Graham Swift feature, amongst others) and the history of science (we learn about Aristotle’s and Sigmund Freud’s complicated relationships with eels) as well as modern marine biology (Rachel Carson and others) we get to know this peculiar animal. In this exploration, we also learn about the human condition, life and death, through natural science and nature writing at its very best.

As Patrik Svensson concludes: 'by writing about eels, I have in some ways found my way home again.'

In this charming and thought-provoking 1926 volume, Arthur Gray, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1912 to 1940, explored the possibility that William Shakespeare spent his formative years at Polesworth Hall in the Forest of Arden, perhaps serving as a page boy. The Forest of Arden once stretched from just north of Stratford-upon-Avon to Tamworth, and covered what is now Birmingham; Polesworth, near Tamworth, was the home of Sir Henry Goodere and the centre of the famed 'Polesworth Circle'. This splendid focus of creative and cultural activity would have offered the young William exposure to the finest minds, a wonderful education and valuable introductions. Sir Henry, who evidently knew John Shakespeare in Stratford, was certainly patron of many young writers and musicians, including the eminent Elizabethan poet, Michael Drayton. If Gray is correct, Drayton would have been a contemporary of Shakespeare's at Polesworth.

'n Biografie van die bekroonde skrywer Jeanne Goosen, met foto's, briewe en bydraes van vriende wat vertel hoe hulle dié ikoniese figuur ken. Die skrywer, Petrovna Metelerkamp, is die 2019-wenner van die ATKV-Veertjie vir nie-fiksie vir Ingrid Jonker - 'n Biografie. Die boek bevat materiaal wat voorheen ontoeganklik was en beloof om ure se leesgenot te verskaf aan die duisende aanhangers van die digter-dramaturg en skrywer van Ons is nie almal so nie.

A wickedly funny memoir with echoes of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, "Beautiful People" (originally published in hardcover as "Nasty") is now a BBC comedy hit series from the producer of "Ab Fab" and "The Office."
Proclaimed "the most brilliant, brash thing in type" by Liz Smith, Simon Doonan's saucy prose has established him as an emerging star among literary humorists. In this break-through memoir, reminiscent of both Sedaris and Burroughs, he revisits the landscape of his youth, and displays the irresistible charm that earned him his dedicated audience.
Long before he became a celebrity in his own right--as the author of best-selling books, as the style arbiter of VH1 and "America's Top Model," and the marketing genius behind Barney's New York--Simon Doonan was a "scabby knee'd troll" in Reading, England. In "Beautiful People," Doonan returns to the working-class neighborhood of his youth, and chronicles the misadventures of the Doonan clan in all their wacky glory. Readers meet his mother Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxide hairdo signified her natural glamour; his father Terry, an amateur vintner who turned parsnips into the legendary Chateau Doonan; his grandfather D.C., a hard-drinking betting man who plotted to win his fortune by turning Simon into a jockey; and his demented grandma Narg and schizophrenic Uncle Ken, both of whom lived upstairs.
Fearing he would fall victim to the insanity that runs in his family, or, worse, the banality of suburban life, Doonan decamps with his flamboyant best-friend Biddie to London, where they hope to find the Beautiful People, that elusive clan who luxuriate on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots. Throughout the memoir--in essays about family holidays, the tart who lived next door, his first job--Doonan continues his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life, only to learn, in the end, that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he left behind.

When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele's death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele, the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa's public sphere. That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi's words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, 'the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time'. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele's rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory. Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa's literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States. This selection of Mphahlele's own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele's correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele's personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April 1987, forty-four of Mphahlele's mature years and most of his active professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell's insightful explanatory notes.

John le Carre was a defining writer of his time. This enthralling collection letters - written to readers, publishers, film-makers and actors, politicians and public figures - reveals the playfully intelligent and unfailingly eloquent man behind the penname. _____ 'The symbiosis of author and editor, father and son, has resulted in a brilliant book, le Carre's final masterpiece' 5*, Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph _____ A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carre's own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Beginning with his 1940s childhood, it includes accounts of his National Service and his time at Oxford, and his days teaching the 'chinless, pointy-nosed gooseberry-eyed British lords' at Eton. It describes his entry into MI5 and the rise of the Iron Curtain, and the flowering of his career as a novelist in reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall. Through his letters we travel with him from the Second World War period to the immediate moment in which we live. We find le Carre writing to Sir Alec Guinness to persuade him to take on the role of George Smiley, and later arguing the immorality of the War on Terror with the chief of the German internal security service. What emerges is a portrait not only of the writer, or of the global intellectual, but, in his own words, of the very private, very passionate and very real man behind the name. _____ Includes letters to: John Banville William Burroughs John Cheever Stephen Fry Graham Greene Sir Alec Guinness Hugh Laurie Ben Macintyre Ian McEwan Gary Oldman Philip Roth Philippe Sands Sir Tom Stoppard Margaret Thatcher And more...

Stunning three-volume slipcased set containing the most comprehensive in-depth companion to Tolkien's life and works ever published, including synopses of all his writings, and a Tolkien gazetteer, who's who and chronology. The three volumes contained in this slipcase, written by two of the foremost experts on J.R.R. Tolkien, comprise the definitive handbook to one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. Tolkien's progress is traced from his birth in South Africa in 1892, to the battlefields of France and the lecture-halls of Leeds and Oxford, to his success as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, until his death in 1973. His many academic and literary achievements, his public reception, and his enduring fame are examined in detail. The first volume in this set is a Chronology of Tolkien's life and works, the most extensive biographical resource about him ever published. Thousands of details have been drawn from letters, contemporary documents in libraries and archives, and a wide variety of other published and unpublished sources. Assembled together, they form a portrait of Tolkien in all his aspects: the distinguished scholar of Old and Middle English, the capable teacher and administrator, the devoted husband and father, the brilliant creator of Middle-earth. The second and third volumes, the Reader's Guide, is an indispensable introduction to Tolkien's life, writings, and art. It includes histories and discussions of his works; analyses of the components of his vast 'Silmarillion' mythology; brief biographies of persons important in his life; accounts of places he knew; essays on topics such as Tolkien's interests and attitudes towards contemporary issues, ideas found in his works, adaptations, and invented languages; and checklists of his published works, his poetry, his pictorial art, and translations of his writing.