Enid Blyton is known throughout the world for her imaginative
children's books and her enduring characters such as Noddy and
the Famous Five. She is one of the most borrowed authors from
British libraries and still holds a fascination for readers old and
young alike.
Yet until 1974, when Barbara Stoney first published her official
biography, little was known about this most private author,
even by members of her own family. The woman who emerged
from Barbara Stoney's remarkable research was hardworking,
complex, often difficult and, in many ways, childlike.
Now this widely praised classic biography has been fully
updated for the twenty-first century and, with the addition of
new color illustrations and a comprehensive list of Enid Blyton's
writings, documents the growing appeal of this extraordinary
woman throughout the world. The fascinating story of one of
the world's most famous authors will intrigue and delight all
those with an interest in her timeless books.

On 3 August 1845, Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready"-and with this, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely "at home", Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was ambivalent towards publication, embraced seclusion and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through ten decisive episodes that distil her evolution as a poet. She follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student, her decision to ask a famous editor for advice, her letters to an unidentified "Master", her frenzy of composition and her terror in confronting blindness. These ten days provide new insights into Dickinson's wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of this enigmatic figure.

The first book to explore the extraordinary story of the legendary friendship - and quarrel - between Wordsworth and Coleridge, two giants of English Romanticism. Wordsworth and Coleridge's passionate intimacy, shared ambition and subsequent estrangement contribute to a tragic tale. But Sisman's biography of this most remarkable friendship - the first to devote itself wholly to exploring the impact of their relationship on each other - seeks to re-examine the orthodox assumption that these two poets flourished as a result of it. Instead, Sisman argues that it was a meeting that may well have been disastrous for both: for it was Wordsworth's rejection of Coleridge, and not primarily his opium addiction, that destroyed the latter as a poet, and that Coleridge's impossible ambitions for Wordsworth pushed the latter towards failure and disappointment. Underlying the poignancy of the tale is the intriguing subject of the influence one writer can have on another. Sisman seeks to answer fundamental questions about this relationship: why was Wordsworth so reliant on Coleridge, and why was he so easily swayed in the most critical decision of his career? Was it in Coleridge's nature to play second fiddle? Would it, in fact, have been better for both men if they had never met?

In this memoir Daniel Huws describes the young and still carefree Ted Hughes, his Cambridge friends, his enthusiasms, his coming out as a poet, the arrival on the scene of Sylvia Plath and of their years in London.

When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet John Williams's quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor, William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner "a perfect novel," and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C. P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it "a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man." The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel traces the life of Stoner's author, John Williams. Acclaimed biographer Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams's life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in the halls of academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams's development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher's Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after Dutch publisher Lebowski brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and has sold over a million copies.

Presented in two volumes, The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500-1700 assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures, in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2: Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of family members -Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke - in the genres of prose romance, drama, poetry, psalms and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other jurisdictions.

Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958) was a political and social activist, journalist, novelist, broadcaster, playwright, and one of the most popular and influential Irish historians of her time. Smith's biography traces her life from her involvement in the War of Independence to her role as a leading civil libertarian in the 1950s. Smith explores her literary career and her international human rights work. An Irish nationalist writer with an international reputation, Macardle was a fascinating woman, and her career sheds light on modern Irish political history, and Irish literature.

The stunning book from Christopher Ross, Sunday Times top 10 bestselling author of 'Tunnel Visions'. In 1970 Japan's most famous writer, Yukio Mishima, cut open his stomach and was then beheaded with his own antique sword. His anachronistic suicide has been called many things: a desperate heroic gesture; a work of art; a political protest; the antics of a madman. But which is correct? And what became of Mishima's sword? Thirty years later Christopher Ross sets out for Japan on the trail of those who might have answers: craftsmen and critics; soldiers and swordsmen; boyfriends and biographers; even the man who taught Mishima hara-kiri. Like his best-selling 'Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher', Christopher Ross has written another unclassifiable blend of travel writing, autobiography and philosophical enquiry to create a mesmeric account of modern Japan and the peculiar death that haunts it to this day.

First published in 1909, with a second edition in 1923, this concise and easily accessible overview of Shelley's life and work presents the poet not as popular legend would have it, but in a more objective light. A.Clutton-Brock notes his forthright and imperious attitude to life - a life in which Shelley found himself increasingly unhappy - and critically examines many facets of his artistic career which are often overlooked or misrepresented.

The extaordinary life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 'Morte d'Arthur'. Sir Thomas Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur' (1469) is one of the best-known books in the world. Virtually all modern versions of the Arthurian legends are derived from its energetic, memorably phrased and remarkably individual telling of the stirring exploits of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Yet the identity of the 15h-century knight who wrote it has remained an enigma for centuries. Only in the last few years has it become possible to construct a convincing life story for him. His life was constantly eventful, marked by great achievement, desperate situations and, at times, deep disgrace. He was an experienced soldier, a star performer at tournaments, a connoisseur of literature, connected to the great and the good, yet he also escaped from prison twice, and was accused of terrible crimes ranging from assault and cattle-rustling to attacks on abbeys and even rape. The foremost chronicler of the legends of the Knights of the Round Table almost certainly wrote much of his great work while imprisoned. Christina Hardyment writes his life story whilst also writing a social history of a fascinating period of English history, an age that marked the high-water mark of medieval chivalry but which was also an essential bridge from the Middle Ages to modern. The book is well furnished with details of clothes, food and domestic interiors, to say nothing of hunting, falconry and jousting techniques, and is a sumptuous work that fleshes out the man and the period in glorious detail. An entertaining book, guided by academic rigour in its scholarship and research.

In 1968 Egyptian novelist and political exile Waguih Ghali committed suicide in the London flat of his editor, friend, and sometime lover, Diana Athill. Ghali left behind six notebooks of diaries that for decades were largely inaccessible to the public. An Egyptian in the Swinging Sixties is the first publication of its kind of the journals, casting fascinating light on a likeable and highly enigmatic literary personality.Waguih Ghali (1930?-69), author of the acclaimed novel Beer in the Snooker Club, was a libertine, sponger, and manic depressive, but also an extraordinary writer, a pacifist, and a savvy political commentator. Covering the last four years of his life, Ghali's Diaries offer an exciting glimpse into London's swinging sixties.Moving from West Germany to London and Israel, and back in memory to Egypt and Paris, the entries boast of endless drinking, countless love affairs, and of mingling with the dazzling intellectuals of London, but the Diaries also critique the sinister political circles of Jerusalem and Cairo, describe Ghali's trepidation at being the first Egyptian allowed into Israel after the 1967 War, and confess in detail the pain and difficulties of writing and exile. Including two interviews conducted by Deborah Starr, with celebrated literary editor Diana Athill, OBE, and with Ghali's cousin, former director of UNICEF-Geneva, Samir Basta, the Diaries bring together those most familiar with Ghali's life and work, and offer a fresh take on a distinctive author and a vibrant decade.

This book, first published in 1944, provides a comprehensive overview of the work and life of the writer and philosopher Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Widely considered one of the greatest novelists of all time, this title examines some of Tolstoy's most seminal works, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This book will be of interest to students of literature and philosophy.

The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writer A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. Ann Jefferson's Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between is the authoritative biography of this major writer. Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian emigre in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man's literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable. Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.

Towards the end of a long and astonishingly full life, whose scope and variety most of us can only dream about, Jan Carew began writing his memoirs. A global, multifaceted man, they cover his multiple lives as Guyanese/Caribbean novelist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activist, the early shaper of Black Studies in the United States, actor and playwright, painter, agricultural evangelist, advisor to Heads of State in Africa and the Caribbean and theoretician of the Columbian origins of racism in the Americas. Where there are gaps, Joy Gleason Carew goes back to some of the vivid, eyewitness journalism Jan Carew wrote in those heady days of hope and struggle.

Although refuted by recent theorists, Leavis's liberal humanist literary criticism remains the single most potent influence on the teaching of literature. This book surveys his career and locates him within the critical tradition. This book should be of interest to students of English literature, and cultural studies.

In the 1890s Oscar Wilde enjoyed one of the most high-profile reputations in Britain; yet, virtually overnight, he was plunged into disgrace and ruin. What were the reasons for this extraordinary reversal of fortune? Ashley Robins explores Wilde's motivation in prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry, and elaborates on the precarious legal situation that effectively quashed any prospect of a withdrawal from the lawsuit without dire consequences. He examines the medical and psychiatric aspects of Wilde's two-year imprisonment and reveals -- for the first time and based on the original Home Office records -- the machinations among prison officials and doctors to cover up Wilde's state of health. Wilde's medical history is presented with an expert evaluation of his terminal illness, including a resolution of the syphilis controversy. Robins details Wilde's tangled matrimonial affairs during his imprisonment and goes on to disclose the manoeuvres adopted by friends to secure his early release, citing hitherto unpublished letters to show that bribery of prison personnel was seriously contemplated. The issue of homosexuality is discussed not only in relation to Oscar Wilde but from the broader historical, legal and biological perspective. The author portrays Wilde's character and behaviour through the images he projected onto society, by the strong but mixed public reaction to him, and by the quality of his interpersonal relationships with his wife, family and close friends. Finally, Wilde's personality is assessed using internationally accepted diagnostic criteria; and, in an unusual and innovative experiment, a group of Wildean scholars completed a psychological questionnaire as if they were doing so for Oscar Wilde himself. Drawing on these findings and on his own extensive psychiatric experience, Ashley Robins concludes that Wilde had a disorder of personality that culminated in the final and tragic phase of his life.

For generations of film and theatre audiences, Charles Boyer was the archetypal Frenchman - cultured, courteous, seductive, yet never quite at home in a culture not his own. Even his murmuring baritone voice echoed that loss, giving him the very essence of romance. While one might have expected that the real-life Boyer was a playboy and serial seducer, in reality, he was intensely private, thoughtful, and fidelitous in love - and very professionally astute. The Great Lover is the first biography of Boyer to exist in English in almost forty years. In an insightful analysis of Boyer's choice of roles during and after World War II, author John Baxter reveals how Boyer, realizing his accent would always mark him as an outsider, both embraced and subverted that identity. Baxter relates how Boyer established himself in the theatre and cinema of France, confidently transitioning from silent film to sound and making a name for himself as a romantic leading man in Hollywood through the early 1940s. During World War II, Boyer put his career on hold to become politically active on behalf of his occupied home country. Upon returning to acting, Baxter shows how Boyer adapted effortlessly to postwar character roles in both Europe and the United States. He entered television in the 1950s as producer and performer, and then remade himself as a comedy performer in the 1960s. A four-time Academy Award nominee, he was honored by the Academy only once for his activities on behalf of France during World War II. Far from clinging to the performances that made him famous, Boyer showed a readiness to break the mold. Yet above all, Baxter argues that Boyer's greatest achievement lies in being the embodiment of exiles everywhere.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Plutarch Award A Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the Year New York Times Review of Books Editors' Choice Non-Fiction Title Longlisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Sunday Times Best Paperback of 2022 'Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling' Washington Post 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain's greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself: a literary giant and a high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage; and a writer who defied chronic illness and long-term disability to change the course of cultural history. It holds up a mirror to the woman, her art - and the art of biography itself.

In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-American writer who changed the face of Western politics and culture. As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black queer advocate, and feminist, Baldwin (1924-1987) was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. war against Vietnam, Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ rights. Mullen explores how Baldwin's life and work channel the long history of African-American freedom struggles, and explains how Baldwin both predicted and has become a symbol of the global Black Lives Matter movement.

"Recounted with the storytelling elan of a master raconteur - by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carre, the legendary author of A Legacy of Spies. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carre is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth; visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carre endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carre gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

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. -- .

It is the mid-1950s in Lewiston, a sleepy town near Niagara Falls, famous only for the invention of the cocktail. Divorce is unheard of, mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon, and television has only just arrived. But with no siblings to provide role-models; a workaholic father chosen by most of her class as Lewiston's present-day saint; a mother who looks the part of the perfect 50s housewife but refuses to play it ('We ate all of our dinners in restaurants?Our fridge contained only allergy serum, coke and maraschino cherries. Our oven was only turned on to dry wet mittens on the door and the only cooking smell I remember from my youth is that of burning wool'); and a gambling-obsessed best friend, Roy, who is 30 years older, perhaps it's hardly surprising that Cathy grows up a little eccentric. Especially considering that the family doctor's prescription for her hyperactivity is a full-time job in her father's pharmacy ? at four.

Cathy is rarely out of trouble whether it's asking why seeing Elvis below the waist is a sin, stabbing the school bully with a compass, breaking through police cordons to interview the Tuscadora Indians or swapping holy water for vodka to test the local priest's alcoholism. She even delivers Nembutal to a sleazy Marilyn Monroe who promptly makes an assignation with Roy. Her highly unusual adventures make compulsive, often moving, reading, but are always hilariously counterbalanced by all the conventional concerns of 50s smalltown life ? TV and rock 'n' roll, matching mother and daughter outfits, teenage rebellion, communism and catholicism. Like all really good memoirs, Too Close to the Falls sneaks up on you; at first you're just reading it quietly to yourself and suddenly you're having to restrain yourself from reading great chunks out to everyone around you.