THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'This is my kind of history: carefully researched but so vivid that you are convinced Lucy Worsley was actually there at the party - or the parsonage.' Antonia Fraser 'A refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity.' Amanda Foreman Lucy Worsley 'is a great scene-setter for this tale of triumph and heartbreak.' Sunday Times On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the rooms from which our best-loved novelist quietly changed the world. This new telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms, but a life that was often a painful struggle. Jane famously lived a 'life without incident', but with new research and insights Lucy Worsley reveals a passionate woman who fought for her freedom. A woman who far from being a lonely spinster in fact had at least five marriage prospects, but who in the end refused to settle for anything less than Mr Darcy.

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Mind Behind the Rings, you'll get a never-before-seen look at the man, the artist, and the believer behind some of the world's most beloved stories. Join bestselling author Mark Horne as he explores lasting impact of the kind of creative freedom that can only come from faith and struggle. Raised in South Africa and Great Britain, young Tolkien led a life filled with uncertainty, instability, and loss. As he grew older, however, the faith that his mother instilled in him continued as an intrinsic contribution to his creative imagination and his everyday life. J. R. R. Tolkien explores: The literary giant's childhood, coming-of-age stories, and the countless hurdles he faced What inspired and influenced The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Tolkien's service in the war The ways that Tolkien's faith influenced his work Previously published as a volume in the Christian Encounters series, this renewed edition of J. R. R. Tolkien now includes updated information about TV series and films inspired by Tolkien's literary creations as well as a discussion guide designed to keep the conversation going.

'He was "not of an age, but for all time".' (Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson) No writer, before or since, has matched Shakespeare in terms of influence, critical acclaim or popular success. His genius lay in his sheer dramatic skill, his powerful use of imagery and his astonishing ability to create richly imagined characters. Packed full of the Bard's clever insights, witty asides and timeless nuggets of wisdom, and complemented by fascinating facts about his life and talents, this Little Book showcases some of the most remarkable lines ever crafted in the English language. SAMPLE QUOTES: 'What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.' - Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' - The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1 'Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.' - Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2 SAMPLE FACT: There is evidence that Shakespeare wrote a play called Cardenio, which was performed by the King's Men in 1613. No known copy of the play exists today.

Charles M. Blow's mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their town in segregated Louisiana, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to "love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel." Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his "do-right" mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After - the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy. The story of how Charles escaped that world to become one of America's most innovative and respected journalists is a searing, redemptive journey that works its way into the deepest chambers of the heart.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life. When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse; she took it as a good omen for her and her mother, Crystal. But that moment of darkness foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine. It took twelve years to find the killer. In that time, Sarah rebuilt her life amid abandonment, police interrogations, and the exacting toll of trauma. She dreamed of a trial, but when the day came, it brought no closure. It was not her mother's death she wanted to understand, but her life. She began her own investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, deep into the darkness of a small American town. &#8220Pull[ing] the reader swiftly along on parallel tracks of mystery and elegy" in After the Eclipse, &#8220Perry succeeds in restoring her mother's humanity and her own" (The New York Times Book Review).

First full-length biography for 30 years of the great First World War poet. Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's 'genius' and T.S. Eliot called him the 'most extraordinary' of the Great War poets. Rosenberg died on the Western Front in 1918 aged only twenty-seven, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect - race, class, education, upbringing, experience and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets. Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work - his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army.

A Bottle, a bag, a rock you feast from the womb to the tomb, in the belly of the Beast, the County Morgue and a Life of Crime As you S c r e a m for a Hit, One more time, A Bottomless pit trapped with scorn, a Dopefiend Dies but another one... was born...

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters.

In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America's celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children. In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist's gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.

'So compellingly personal you feel you're looking over her shoulder as she sits down to write' New York Times 'Electrically entertaining ... Funny, generous, spirited and kind' The Times This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is an irresistible blend of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, the gradual loss of her beloved grandmother, starting her own bookshop in Nashville, her love for her very special dog and, of course, her eventual happy marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a memoir both wide ranging and deeply personal, overflowing with close observation and emotional wisdom, told with wit, honesty and irresistible warmth.

John Buchan's name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past one hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock.

Yet there was vastly more to 'JB'. He wrote more than a hundred books – fiction and non-fiction – and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul – given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.

His teenage years in Glasgow's Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story.

Ursula Buchan, his granddaughter, has drawn on recently discovered family documents to write this comprehensive and illuminating biography. With perception, style, wit and a penetratingly clear eye, she brings vividly to life this remarkable man and his times.

Iris Origo was one of the twentieth century's most attractive and intriguing women, a brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer whose works remains widely admired. Iris grew up in Italy with her Irish mother after the death of her wealthy American father. They settled in the Villa Medici in Florence, where they became part of the colourful and privileged Anglo-Florentine set that included Edith Wharton, Harold Acton and the Berensons.When Iris married Antonio Origo, they bought and revived La Foce, a derelict stretch of the beautiful Val d'Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate that thrives to this day. During World War II they sided firmly with the Allies, taking considerable risks in protecting children and sheltering partisans and Iris's diary from that time, War in Val d'Orcia, is now considered a modern classic. Caroline Moorehead has drawn on many previously unpublished letters, diaries, and papers to write the definitive biography of a very remarkable woman.

An acclaimed biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English writers Geoffrey Chaucer is often called the father of English literature, but this acclaimed biography reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the circulation of his writings, Marion Turner reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. From the wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence, the book recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings. The result is a landmark biography and a fresh account of the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.

An Irish Times and The i Book of 2022 'Tense and intimate . . . an education' - Geoff Dyer 'Enriching, sobering and at times heartrending. A wonder' - Sir Lenny Henry 'Authentic, fascinating and deeply moving' - Terry Waite __________ Can someone in prison be more free than someone outside? Would we ever be good if we never felt shame? What makes a person worthy of forgiveness? Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every day he has conversations with people inside about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation. When Andy steps into a prison, he also confronts his inherited shame: his father, uncle and brother all spent time behind bars. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still fears that their fate will also be his. As he discusses pressing questions of truth, identity and hope with his students, he searches for his own form of freedom too. Moving, sympathetic, wise and frequently funny, The Life Inside is an elegantly written and unforgettable memoir. Through a blend of storytelling and gentle philosophical questioning, it offers a new insight into our stretched justice system, our failing prisons and the complex lives being lived inside. __________ 'Inspiring' - The Observer 'Strives with humour and compassion to understand the phenomenon of prison' - Sydney Review of Books 'Expands both heart and mind' - Ciaran Thapar 'A fascinating and enlightening journey . . . A legitimate page-turner' - 3AM

It is so good, after so many years of public indifference, even hostility towards Vincent and his work, to feel towards the end of my life that the battle is won.' JO VAN GOGH-BONGER TO GUSTAVE COQUIOT, 1922 'It is a sacrifice for the sake of Vincent's glory.' JO VAN GOGH-BONGER ON THE SALE OF 'THE SUNFLOWERS' TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY, UK, 1924 Little known but no less influential, Jo van Gogh-Bonger was sister-in-law of Vincent van Gogh, wife of his brother, Theo. When the brothers died soon after each other, she took charge of Van Gogh's artistic legacy and devoted the rest of her life to disseminating his work. Despite being widowed with a young son, Jo successfully navigated the male-dominated world of the art market-publishing Van Gogh's letters, organizing exhibitions in the Netherlands and throughout the world, and making strategic sales to private individuals and influential dealers-ultimately establishing Van Gogh's reputation as one of the finest artists of his generation. In doing so, she fundamentally changed how we view the relationship between the artist and his work. She also lived a rich and fascinating life-not only was she friends with eminent writers and artists, but she also was active within the Social Democratic Labour Party and closely involved in emerging women's movements. Using rich source material, including unseen diaries, documents and letters, Hans Luijten charts the multi-faceted life of this visionary woman with the drive to shake the art world to its core.

This is the long-awaited supplementary volume to the authoritative seven-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate and Richard Purdy, that was published by OUP between 1978 and 1988. Volume 8, edited by Millgate in collaboration with leading Hardy scholar Professor Keith Wilson, contains previously unpublished letters from all periods of Hardy's career, his earliest known letter among them. It introduces important new correspondents, throws fresh light on existing correspondences, and richly enhances the reader's understanding of both familiar and hitherto unfamiliar aspects of Hardy's life and work and of the times in which he lived.

An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the number one bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic

What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare?

Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love inspired millions of readers to embark upon their own journeys of self-discovery. A decade later, Big Magic empowered countless others to live their most creative lives. Now comes another landmark book – about love and loss, addiction and recovery, grief and liberation.

In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites: Rayya, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist; Liz, a married people-pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity. Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. Unacknowledged: they were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if the love of your life – and the person you most trusted in the world – became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

All the Way to the River is for everyone who has ever been captive to love – or to any other passion, substance, or craving – and who yearns, at long last, for peace and freedom.

The second volume of Max Saunders's magisterial biography of Ford Madox Ford takes up the story from Ford's enlistment in the army and departure for France in 1916. Like its predecessor, The After-War World makes full use of previously unpublished and long-lost material. It is the first biography to establish Ford's importance to modern literature: exploring the relations between a writer's life, autobiography, and fiction, and showing how Ford's case challenges the conventions of literary biography itself. Saunders provides a ground-breaking reading of Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, and describes the founding of the transatlantic review, the influential literary journal that published Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Picasso, and many more major writers and artists. Ford's personal relationships were no less complex than his work: while living with Stella Bowen after the breakup of his partnership with Violet Hunt he had a brief affair with Jean Rhys, but he was to spend his final years until his death in 1939, with the Polish American painter Janice Biala. Throughout his career Ford endlessly reinvented himself, and this biography, for the first time, offers a sustained and critical account of his dazzling literary transformations.

The first volume of a major new critical biography Ford Madox Ford wrote some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, mastering and metamorphosing all its major forms: the novel, literary criticism, travel writing, even historical and cultural discourse. He was also an innovative and influential poet, as well as the century's greatest literary editor. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad, and advised Ezra Pound; his admirers include novelists as diverse as Sinclair Lewis, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and Gore Vidal. This first volume of a two-volume life takes Ford from his birth as Ford Hermann Hueffer in 1873 to the eve of his departure for France, and war, in 1916. It charts his growth and development as a writer of great complexity, first with the trilogy The Fifth Queen and culminating in his masterpiece The Good Soldier. It also examines his turbulent emotional life, from his elopement and marriage to Elsie Martindale in 1894 to his affair with Violet Hunt in the same year that he founded The English Review. Ford said that a writer's life is 'a dual affair', a life enshrined in the writing and Max Saunders's aim is to examine the interconnections between the private and the public life, and the inner life that drove him. The discovery of new manuscripts, and of letters unavailable to previous biographers ensure that this is the most important and exhaustive critical biography of Ford to appear in the last twenty years.

Delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2017, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs is the lecture of the Nobel Laureate in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro. A generous and hugely insightful biographical sketch, it explores his relationship with Japan, reflections on his own novels and an insight into some of his inspirations, from the worlds of writing, music and film. Ending with a rallying call for the ongoing importance of literature in the world, it is a characteristically thoughtful and moving piece.

By a River, On a Hill brings you into the lives of twins born during the depression in a small steel mill town in Western Pennsylvania and carries you through the depression, the war, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge and on to two completely different routes of success of each to his chosen profession. One who gains his success on a journey that carries him to Argentina for three years and later to Brazil for three years fighting for acceptance in his chosen field until gaining the recognition he deserves, becoming Chief consultant for U.S. Steel on Coke Oven problem solving and eventually establishing an international construction company. The other, who gains his initial success through invention of integrated circuits before becoming an expert in the production of the "chip" and finally his success in Silicon Valley competing against the world's best technical minds in a tough semiconductor industry, eventually playing the major role in taking a small test company to be a successful Analog Semiconductor Company. The story carries you with them through their early experiences, the Navy, the tough steel mills and finally in their tough fields of endeavor; carrying you as it carried them. You experience their obstacles and their triumphs as if you were there working your way up, side by side and battling for a place in the sun. The title of the book relates to the goals of the twins which are as different as their paths to reach them.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2021** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE** **FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PLUTARCH AWARD** D. H. Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be. Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson presents a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'A work of art in its own right' OBSERVER 'Utterly enthralling' GEOFF DYER 'Brilliantly unconventional' RICHARD HOLMES 'A red-hot, propulsive book' THE TIMES

A fascinating new study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' illuminates the poet's deeply troubled personality and stormy personal life through a highly original study of his relationships. In her last published work the celebrated Coleridgean scholar, Molly Lefebure, provides profound psychological insights into Coleridge through a meticulous study of his domestic life, drawing upon a vast and unique body of knowledge gained from a lifetime's study of the poet, and making skilful use of the letters, poems and biographies of the man himself and his family and friends. The author traces the roots of Coleridge's unarguably dysfunctional personality from his earliest childhood; his position as his mother's favoured child, the loss of this status with the death of his father, and removal to the 'Bluecoat' school in London. Coleridge's narcissistic depression, flamboyance, and cold-hearted, often cruel, rejection of his family and of loving attachments in general are examined in detail. The author also explores Coleridge's careers in journalism and politics as well as poetry, in his early, heady 'jacobin' days, and later at the heart of the British wartime establishment at Malta. His virtual abandonment of his children and tragic disintegration under the influence of opium are included in the broad sweep of the book which also encompasses an examination of the lives of Coleridge's children, upon whom the manipulations of the father left their destructive mark. Molly Lefebure unravels the enigma that is Coleridge with consummate skill in a book that will bring huge enjoyment to any reader with an interest in the poet's life and times. Molly Lefebure (1919-2013) was a wartime journalist, novelist, children's author, writer on the topography of Cumbria, biographer, and independent scholar and lecturer. She is the author of two other works on the Coleridge family and a volume on the world of Thomas Hardy. Lefebure was secretary to Professor Keith Simpson (1907-1985), the renowned Home Office Pathologist and head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, with whom she worked during the Second World War. While surrounded by London's crime, grime and gruesome deaths she wrote a memoire, published as 'Evidence for the Crown' (1955), which formed the basis for the successful television drama, 'Murder on the Home Front' (2013). Having been fascinated by her work in the mortuaries, Lefebure continued at Guy's Hospital and studied drug addiction for six years, which led her to write her first biography of Coleridge ('Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium', 1974). 'Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' is the distillation of the lifetime's thought of one whom many regard as having been one of the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world. 'Molly Lefebure's insight into Coleridge's marriage is second to none. Her perception of him as a man and a poet is intellectually formidable. She can be both critical and understanding on the same page. There is a full field of Coleridge scholars at the moment, but in my view Molly was in there first, and is still the outstanding one.' From the Foreword by Melvyn Bragg.

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker track Marvell's negotiations among personalities and events; explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions, and speculate on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings -- what they call his 'imagined life'. Hirst and Zwicker draw the figure of an imagined life from the repeated traces Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and suggest how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination.
The book sheds new light on some of Marvell's most familiar poems -- 'Upon Appleton House', 'The Garden', ' To His Coy Mistress', and 'Horatian Ode' -- but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell's 'The unfortunate Lover', his least familiar and surely most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading, for the first time, of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.