Paul Leautaud was both one of the oddest characters in French literature and, as a staff member of the review Mercure de France, at the centre of Parisian literary life for over half a century. First published in 1974, this book represents the first full length biography of Leautaud in any language. The author recreates the world of a man who, once regarded as a mere eccentric, is now recognised as a significant figure in contemporary literature. It traces Leautaud's intimate friendships with many famous writers of the time and gives a lively panorama of the French literary scene and its vivid characters.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) stands out as one of the most respected, influential authors of the twentieth century. Though primarily known as a children's book writer and illustrator, he did not limit himself to these areas. He saw himself first and foremost as an artist. In this collection of interviews - the first of its kind - Sendak presents himself as a writer, illustrator, set designer, and librettist. From his early work with Randall Jarrell and Ruth Krauss through his later work with Tony Kushner and Spike Jonze, Sendak worked as a collaborator with a passion for the arts. The interviews here, many of which are hard to find or previously unpublished, span from 1966 through 2011. They show not only Sendak's shifting artistic interests, but also changes in how he understood himself and his craft. What emerges is a portrait of an author and an artist who was alternately solemn and playful, congenial and irascible, sophisticated and populist. The man who showed millions of children and adults alike what's cooking in the night kitchen and where the wild things are, Sendak remains an American original who redefined the picture book and changed children's literature - and its readers - forever.

Ceremonies of Bravery is a study of the friendship between the prolific writer Oscar Wilde and Carlos Blacker. The two men met in the 1880s, the period when Wilde was judged by many to be 'at his best', and Blacker went on to become a trustee of Wilde's marriage settlement. Wilde declared Blacker 'the truest of friends and the most sympathetic of companions', and diaries and letters show that the men were close confidantes for almost two decades, a period during which both endured personal crises and disgrace. However, the relationship came to an abrupt end in June 1898. Carlos Blacker recorded prophetically in his diary, 'After lunch just before dinner letter from Oscar which put an end to our friendship forever'.
Robert Maguire draws on Blacker's diaries to paint a rich portrait of Wilde's dear friend in their shared social milieu, providing an account that adds much to the already vivid picture of Wilde's life. He devotes the first half of the book to the formative years of the friendship, showing the two men attempting to support each other in disgrace, with personal crises unfolding in parallel in their lives. Maguire then turns his attention to the men's reunion in Paris in March 1898, some three years after Wilde's arrest. Here, the Dreyfus Affair was at its peak, and Wilde and Blacker found themselves with very different perspectives. Maguire weaves together court records, letters, and diaries to propose a new account of the way in which Dreyfusard Blacker, working on a secret plan to establish Dreyfus's innocence, drew his old friend Oscar Wilde into his confidence. Wilde, on the other hand, was developing increasing interest in and sympathy for the real traitor Esterhazy, and it is most likely that this led him to betray Blacker's confidence, ending the friendship between the two men.
The obscurity surrounding Carlos Blacker's role in the Dreyfus affair, as well as the attendant circumstances of his painful breakup with Oscar Wilde, was mainly due to Blacker's own rigidly maintained silence to the time of his death in 1928. The full story did not come to light until the transcription beginning in 1989 of Blacker's diaries. Using these diaries, alongside other archival sources, Ceremonies of Bravery provides new insight into a special relationship while also offering a unique perspective on the Dreyfus Affair.

Langston Hughes, one of America's greatest writers, was an innovator of jazz poetry and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance whose poems and plays resonate widely today. Accessible, personal, and inspirational, Hughes' poems portray the African American community in struggle in the context of a turbulent modern United States and a rising black freedom movement. This indispensable volume of letters between Hughes and four leftist confidants sheds vivid light on his life and politics. Letters from Langston begins in 1930 and ends shortly before his death in 1967, providing a window into a unique, self-created world where Hughes lived at ease. This distinctive volume collects the stories of Hughes and his friends in an era of uncertainty and reveals their visions of an idealized world - one without hunger, war, racism, and class oppression.

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 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

This is the first book-length study of the work of contemporary writer Bernard Kops. Born on November 28, 1926 to Dutch-Jewish immigrants, Bernard Kops became famous after the production of his play The Hamlet of Stepney Green: A Sad Comedy with Some Songs in 1958. This play, like much of his work, focuses on the conflicts between young and old. Identified as an "angry young man," Kops, like his contemporaries John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, and Harold Pinter, belonged to the so-called new wave of British drama that emerged in the mid-1950s. Kops went on to create important documentaries about the Blitz and living in London during the early 1940s. He has written two autobiographies, over ten novels, many journalistic pieces, and more than forty plays for TV, stage, and radio. A prolific poet, Kops has authored a long pamphlet poem and eight poetry collections. Now in his mid-80s, the prolific and versatile Kops still produces, his creativity undimmed by age.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019 'This is a book of wonders' Sunday Times 'Spellbinding and intelligent' Financial Times 'Extraordinary and engrossing' Spectator It was the most extraordinary year. In a book brimming with poetry and nature writing, biography and adventure, Adam Nicolson walks in the footsteps of Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy during the months in the late 1790s they spent together in the Quantock Hills. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner, 'Kubla Khan', Lyrical Ballads and 'Tintern Abbey'; Coleridge's unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood; Wordsworth's revolutionary verses and paeans to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In short, a poetry that sought to remake the world.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen never goes out of style.

Jane Austen's much-loved novels vividly describe 19th-century society. But they are also timeless classics that continue to enjoy wild popularity 200 years after the author's death. Her delightfully quotable observations on love, men and women, society and class remain as relevant as they ever were. Packed full of intelligent insights, witty asides and wry observations, alongside fascinating facts about Austen's remarkable life, this Little Book showcases some of the best lines ever crafted in the English language.

This biography of Joseph Severn (1793-1879), the best known but most controversial of Keats's friends, is based on a mass of newly discovered information, much of it still in private hands. Severn accompanied the dying Keats to Italy, nursed him in Rome and reported on his last weeks there in a famous series of moving letters. After Keats's death in relative obscurity, Severn pressed hard for an early biography and a more fitting memorial in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
In the nineteenth century Severn's friendship with Keats was seen as a model of devoted masculine companionship and he was reburied by popular acclaim next to Keats in 1882. In the twentieth century, by contrast, he was denigrated as an unreliable, self-promoting witness. Sue Brown's book fills a major gap in studies of Keats and his circle. It reassesses Severn's character, friendship with Keats, and influence on the posthumous development of the poet's fame and provides new information on Keats's death.
The significance of Severn's artistic career has previously been downplayed. This book offers the first full assessment of his work and of his turbulent spell as British Consul in Rome from 1860 to 1871. Keats was not Severn's only famous friend. For most of his adult life Severn was at the heart of the large, lively British community in Rome welcoming amongst others Gladstone, who became his most important patron, Ruskin, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Turner, Samuel Palmer, David Wilkie, and many more. He maintained long friendships with Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Charles Eastlake, Richard Monckton Milnes, amongst others, and enjoyed a rich family life.

Published in 1990: This book tells the life story of Dante, the poet and his work.

A collection of wisdom and life lessons, from the beloved and bestselling author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to my Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: it's part guidebook, part memoir, part poetry - and pure delight. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion's novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion's interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion's fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion's oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion's fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion's fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity - which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget (1856-1935) - a prolific author best known for her supernatural fiction and her radical polemics. She was also an active letter writer whose correspondents include many well-known figures in fin de siecle intellectual circles across Europe. However, until now no attempt has been made to make these letters widely available in their complete form. This multi-volume scholarly edition presents a comprehensive selection of her English, French, Italian, and German correspondence - compiled from more than 30 archives worldwide - that reflect her wide variety of interests and occupations as a Woman of Letters and contributor to scholarship and political activism. Letters written in a language other than English have been expertly translated by scholars Sophie Geoffroy (from the French), Crystal Hall (from the Italian), and Christa Zorn (from the German). The edition focuses on those letters concerning the writing, ideas and aesthetics that influenced Lee's articles, books and stories. Full transcriptions of some 500 letters, covering the years 1856-1935, are arranged in chronological order along with newly written introductions that explain their context and identifies the recipients, friends and colleagues mentioned. Since scholarship on Lee's critical and creative output is still in the beginning stages, these letters will serve a purpose to students and researchers in a number of academic fields. In this second volume, covering the years 1885-1889, the 421 assembled letters follow Violet Paget-Vernon Lee in her early thirties. Recovering from the stinging reception of her first novel and from Annie Meyer's death, she turns to essay writing on aesthetics and ethics and ghost stories. After Mary Robinson's engagement to marry French orientalist Prof. Darmesteter, she travels to Spain, Gibraltar and Tangiers and briefly falls under the spell of the Orient. She also takes a liking to Scotland, and many of her close friends are Scottish --Alice Callander, Lady "Archie" (Janey Sevilla Archibald Campbell)-and so is her future partner Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. The letters reflect the expansion of her subject matter from cultural studies, art history and aesthetic philosophy. Her charity work in hospitals in Florence and her readings in Political Economy lead her thinking towards social reform and political issues. Her brother's mental illness and her own breakdown bring about an awareness of body and mind balance and a taste for outdoor pursuits (mountaineering; bicycling; horse riding; swimming) and for experimental psychology (rotating mirrors; hypnosis) and therapies (hydrotherapy). The Pagets move away from the city center of Florence into the Villa Il Palmerino, then in the countryside, where both Eugene and Vernon recover. Correspondents include Lee's parents, Matilda and Henry Ferguson Paget; her step-brother poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton; English poetess Mary Robinson; English poet Robert Browning; British novelist and journalist Ellen Mary Abdy-Williams; British social reform activist and editor Percy William Bunting; Irish journalist and activist Frances Power Cobbe; Irish scholar and novelist Bella Duffy; British eugenicist Karl Pearson; British publisher William Blackwood; Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson; American novelist Henry James; American connoisseur and arts patron Isabella Stuart Gardner; French translator and critic Marie-Therese Blanc ("Th. Bentzon"); Lady Louisa Wolseley; Irish historian and activist Alice Stopford-Green; Italian Countess Angelica (Pasolini) Rasponi; Italian poet, writer and critic Enrico Nencioni; Italian novelist, essayist and critic Mario Pratesi; Italian editor and man of letters Francesco Protonotari; Italian painter Telemaco Signorini.

In the autumn of 1873, Wilkie Collins followed the example of fellow literary celebrities Dickens and Thackeray, and began a six-month reading tour of America. Hanes places this tour within the American lyceum movement of the later nineteenth century. Through close examination of personal letters, news accounts and newspaper reviews, she builds a picture of the relationship between Collins and the American reading public.

This book is a memoir with a ‘double heartbeat’. At its centre is the author’s relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature.

Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera’s legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple’s first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987.

What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health.

James Arbuckle (c.1700-1742), poet and essayist, was born in Belfast to a Presbyterian merchant family of Scottish origin and educated at Glasgow University (1717-1723). In Glasgow, his poetry, influenced by Pope and the Latin classics, won praise from leading members of Scotland's literary and political establishment, including Allan Ramsay. In 1723 he moved to Dublin, producing under the name "Hibernicus" Ireland's first literary journal, in collaboration with a group of young Whig intellectuals forming the "Molesworth circle". He aimed at first to avoid politics, but in the highly politicized Dublin of Dean Swift that proved impossible. He was satirized by members of Swift's circle and responded with the ironic Panegyric on the Rev Dean Swift. His later work, especially The Tribune, developed a radical and anticlerical critique of contemporary Ireland, in which Swift was represented more as Church Tory than Irish patriot. Arbuckle was well-known in his day, but his work has not been published since the end of the eighteenth century. He has often been discussed in modern scholarly work across a range of disciplines: on Swift and Pope; Scottish poetry and especially Allan Ramsay; Francis Hutcheson and the early Scottish Enlightenment; the background to the United Irishmen of 1798; the history of Irish presbyterians. Arbuckle himself has not been the focus of detailed scholarly inquiry until now. This edition presents an annotated selection of Arbuckle's work in poetry and prose. It begins with a substantial introduction dealing with his biography and political and literary context. It is then divided into three parts. The first, on his Scottish period, includes the annotated texts of his two principal poems, Snuff and Glotta. The second presents a selection of the "Hibernicus" essays, grouped by four themes: literary (which will include a selection of his Horace translations); philosophical (responding principally to Francis Hutcheson); political (placing him in the contemporary varieties of Whiggism, and especially the dispute between Walpole and "Opposition" Whigs); religious (the focus here is on his writing on toleration). The final section deals with his response to Swift's Irish writing, as demonstrated in selected essays from The Tribune and in A Panegyric.

Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.
Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968.
One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009
One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009
"Excellent."
--Time magazine
"A terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century."
--The American Thinker
"A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles."
--Mises Economics Blog

An American Teacher in Argentina tells the story of Mary E. Gorman who in 1869 was the first North American woman to accept President Domingo F. Sarmiento's invitation to set up normal schools in Argentina, where she eventually settled. An ordinary historical actor whose life only sometimes enters the historical record, she moved along the fault lines of some of the greatest historical dramas and changes in nineteenth-century US and Argentine history: she was a pioneering child on the US-Indian frontier; she participated in the push for US women's education; she was a single woman traveler at a time when few women traveled alone; she was a player in an Argentine attempt to expand common school education; and a beneficiary of the great primary products export boom in the second half of nineteenth-century Argentina, and thus well positioned to enjoy the country's Belle Epoque. The book is not a straightforward, biographical narrative of a woman's life. It charts a life, but, more important, it charts the evolving ideas in a life lived mostly among people pushing boundaries in pursuit of what they considered progress. What emerges is a quintessentially transnational life story that engages with themes of gender, education, religion, contact with indigenous peoples in both the US and Argentina, natural history, and economic and political change in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the book tells a good story about one woman's rich and eventful life, it will also appeal to an audience beyond academe.