At the time of his death at the age of 95, Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was the most famous historian in the world. His books were translated into more than fifty languages and he was as well known in Brazil and Italy as he was in Britain and the United States. His writings have had a huge and lasting effect on the practice of history. More than half a century after it appeared, his books remain a staple of university reading lists. He had an extraordinarily long life, with interests covering many countries and many cultures, ranging from poetry to jazz, literature to politics. He experienced life not only as a university teacher but also as a young Communist in the Weimar Republic, a radical student at Cambridge, a political activist, an army conscript, a Soho 'man about town', a Hampstead intellectual, a Cambridge don, an influential journalist, a world traveller, and finally a Grand Old Man of Letters. In A Life in History, Richard Evans tells the story of Hobsbawm as an academic, but also as witness to history itself, and of the twentieth century's major political and intellectual currents. Eric not only wrote and spoke about many of the great issues of his time, but participated in many of them too, from Communist resistance to Hitler to revolution in Cuba, where he acted as an interpreter for Che Guevara. He was a prominent part of the Jazz scene in Soho in the late 1950s and his writings played a pivotal role in the emergence of New Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This, the first biography of Eric Hobsbawm, is far more than a study of a professional historian. It is a study of an era.

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.

Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

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 first scholarly treatment of the life of William Maginn (1794-1842), David Latane's meticulously researched biography follows Maginn's life from his early days in Ireland through his career in Paris and London as political journalist and writer and finally to his sad decline and incarceration in debtor's prison. A founding editor of the daily Standard (1827), Maginn was a prodigal author and editor. He was an early and influential contributor to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and a writer from the Tory side for The Age, New Times, English Gentleman, Representative, John Bull, and many other papers. In 1830, he launched Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, the early venue for such Victorians as Thackeray and Carlyle, and he was intimately involved with the poet 'L.E.L.' In 1837, he wrote the prologue for the first issue of Bentley's Miscellany, edited by Dickens. Through painstaking archival research into Maginn's surviving letters and manuscripts, as well as those of his associates, Latane restores Maginn to his proper place in the history of nineteenth-century print culture. His book is essential reading for nineteenth-century scholars, historians of the book and periodical, and anyone interested in questions of authorship in the period.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado's writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. G. Reginald Daniel, an expert on Brazilian race relations, takes a fresh look at how Machado's writings were inflected by his life--especially his experience of his own racial identity. The result is a new interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.

A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most influential writers in America. In this moving and surprising book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history - and America's. Where I Was From, in Didion's words, "represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. Didion examines how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today - a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government. Joan Didion's unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of America's greatest writers.

First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.

"America came to him in a public ward in the Los Angeles County Hospital while around him men died gasping for their last bit of air, and he learned that while America could be cruel it could also be immeasurably kind. . . . For Carlos Bulosan no lifetime could be long enough in which to explain to America that no man could destroy his faith in it again. He wanted to contribute something toward the final fulfillment of America. So he wrote this book that holds the bitterness of his own blood." - Carlos P. Romulo, "New York Times"

"The premier text of the Filipino-American experience." - Greg Castilla

In this incisive collection of speeches and essays, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recalling his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. A remarkable and revelatory work from one of our greatest living novelists, "Farther Away "traces the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day.

Samuel Johnson (1709-84) rose from obscure origins to become one of the major literary figures of the 18th century as a poet, essayist, lexicographer, literary critic, and conversationalist. He was also renowned as one of the most outspoken and controversial political commentators of the age, fomenting both admiration and rage in his own time, and still dividing scholars and readers to this day. Hudson's biography reassesses the evidence for Johnson's being an arch-conservative, as some have thought, or as a humane liberal, as others have argued.

'Entirely original and thrilling . . . this is Gatsby made real' JULIET NICOLSON 'This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it.' MIRIAM MARGOLYES In the 1920s a new generation stepped forward to invigorate the Bloomsbury Group - creative young people who tantalised the original 'Bloomsberries' with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. Young Bloomsbury introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West, 'who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet'; sculptor Stephen Tomlin; and writer Julia Strachey. Talented and productive, these larger-than-life figures had high-achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives. Bloomsbury had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, feeling that every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose. But as transgressive self-expression became more public, this younger generation gave Old Bloomsbury a new voice. Revealing an aspect of Bloomsbury history not yet explored, Young Bloomsbury celebrates an open way of living that would not be embraced for another hundred years.

Frances Partridge: the last survivor of the Bloomsbury group - the authorised biography. Frances Partridge was one of the great British diarists of the 20th century. She became part of the Bloomsbury group encountering Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, the Bells, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge. She and Ralph fell in love and married in 1933. During the Second World War they were committed pacifists and they enjoyed the happiest times of their lives together, entertaining friends such as E.M. Forster, Robert Kee and Duncan Grant. Despite losing both her husband and son, Frances maintained an astonishing appetite for life, whether for her friends, travelling, botany, or music. Her diaries (which she continued to write until her death in 2004) chronicle her life from the 1930s onwards. Their publication brought her recognition and acclaim, and earned her the right to be seen not as a minor character on the Bloomsbury stage but standing at the centre of her own.

First published in 1970, this is a detailed and balanced biography of one of the most controversial literary figures of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound, an American who left home for Venice and London at the age of twenty-three, was a leading member of 'the modern movement', a friend and helper of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Hemingway, an early supporter of Lawrence and Frost. As a critic of modern society his far-reaching and controversial theories on politics, economics and religion led him to broadcast over Rome Radio during the Second World War, after which he was indicted for treason but declared insane by an American court. He then spent more than twelve years in St Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C. In 1958 the changes against him were dropped and he returned to Italy where he had lived between 1924 and 1945.

The Time Machine is one of the most enduring works of the English language. A hundred years after it was first published, the book continues to be studied. The 1895 London first edition is used as a basis for the exhaustive annotations and other critical apparatus of the world's foremost Wellsian scholar. The widely reprinted version of 1924 is also fully accounted for. For most students, one of the chief points of interest is what the novel signified to readers when it was first published and how it relates to Wells's later works. Accordingly, the annotations focus on these questions. The introduction gives in great depth the background of the work and its complex bibliographical history, and a synopsis of the literary conventions that Wells used.

H.G. Wells barely revised The Invisible Man once it was published, adding only an epilogue. But the opening statement of that epilogue--So ends the strange and evil experiment of the Invisible Man--has posed challenges to scholars. How to understand it? Does it speak strictly to the scientific elements of the novel? Or is it a part of the work's political underpinnings? The 1897 New York first edition (the first edition to incorporate the epilogue) is used here as the basis for the exhaustive annotations and other critical apparatus of the world's foremost Wellsian scholar. The introduction examines in great detail the novel's position in the Wellsian canon and sets the major themes in context with the literary conventions used in his other works, particularly the scientific romances.

Much attention has been paid to the scientific romance novels of H.G. Wells, a founder of modern science fiction and one of the genre's greatest writers. In comparison, little attention has been given by critics to his works of fantasy, which in the opinion of many, are just as artistic and worthy of study. This work, takes a critical look at Wells' little known fantasy The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine, which is a parable of dark foreboding that unveils the nothingness of utopian dreams and foreshadows Franz Kafka's dark fables of the totalitarian age. A lengthy introduction by the editor provides a comprehensive overview of the text and the story of The Sea Lady, and serves to explain the ideas of civil death and every citizen's acting as a public servant, and the concept of totalitarian metaphysics, which deals with a revolt against the limits of the human condition. This work provides a complete, extensively annotated text of the 1902 London first edition of The Sea Lady.

Man Who Could Work Miracles (without a The) is a 1937 film, ostensibly a comedy, that H.G. Wells scripted late in life for London Film Productions. This work is a literary text of the scenario and dialogue published in advance of the movie's release. Wells himself says it is a companion piece to Things to Come, his deadly serious film done a year before, also produced by Alexander Korda. The editor's introduction explains how two such radically different films are related and discusses the artistic quality of the text, Wells' overriding sense of cosmic vision, his views on sex and politics, and his uncommon estimate of the common man's incapacity for public affairs. The world's foremost Wellsian scholar here brings his unique analytical powers to bear on, in the opinion of many, the strangest work Wells ever wrote. The appendices include the 1898 short story version, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, three related cosmic-vision short stories by Wells, and an excerpt from a 1931 radio address by Wells not inaccurately retitled If I Were Dictator of the World.

Things to Come is the 1936 release of London Films, produced from the 1935 film story by H.G. Wells, the text of the present work. The book includes more than 100 illustrations, most of them publicity stills that are all the more relevant because Wells, for a script writer, had unusual control over the actual film production. The images are very much a direct expression of his film story. Done at age 70, Things to Come reflects on a long literary career, in both fiction and nonfiction, often given to the fate of man and the prospect of a unified world state, a utopian future realized in the film by A.D. 2036. That is what is coming: the end of warfare between belligerent nation states. Now the new frontier of human conquest is space, begun at film's end with the first firing of a gigantic space gun.

The identity of Shakespeare, the most important poet and dramatist in the English language, has been debated for centuries. This historical work investigates the role of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, establishing him as most likely the author of Shakespeare's literary oeuvre. Topics include the historical background of English literature from 1530 through 1575, major contemporary transitions in the theatre, and a linguistically rich examination of Oxford's life and the events leading to his literary prominence. The sonnets, Oxford's early poetry, juvenile "pre-Shakespeare" plays, and his acting career are of particular interest. An appendix examines the role of the historical William Shakespeare and how he became associated with Oxford's work.

The Karamazov Correspondence: Letters of Vladimir S. Soloviev represents the first fully annotated and chronologically arranged collection of the Russian philosopher-poet's most important letters, the vast majority of which have never before been translated into English. Soloviev was widely known for his close association with Fyodor M. Dostoevsky in the final years of the novelist's life, and these letters reflect many of the qualities and contradictions that also personify the title characters of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The selected letters cover all aspects of Soloviev's life, ranging from vital concerns about human rights and the political and religious turmoil of his day to matters related to family and friends, his love life, and early drafts of his works, including poetic endeavors.