Keith Douglas was almost certainly the greatest poet of the Second World War. He was killed in Normandy three days after D-Day. He was only twenty-four. His short life was one of contradictions: the gifted artist and romantic, always in love with the wrong girl also enjoyed soldiering and was quick to volunteer at the beginning of the war. The brave and resourceful tank commander with the Sherwood Rangers in the Western Desert, in the campaign of which his Alemein to Zem Zem is the classic account, was also an outspoken critic of the military establishment and often in trouble with his superiors. There was always another side to Keith Douglas: difficult, even arrogant, he was at the same time, as Desmond Graham, observes in his original preface, 'generous, sensitive to the difficulties of others, remorselessly honest, energetic, and passionately, innocently open.' Douglas made in his brief life some friends who never forgot him, and whose memories of him have contributed much to this book. For this biography, Desmond Graham had access to much private and unpublished material. From that, interviews, Keith Douglas' own poems, letters and drawings emerges a definitive biography. 'an almost unqualified success . . . Mr Graham has used his material with great skill and tact.' Roy Fuller 'It is difficult to imagine a better biography than this being written about Keith Douglas . . . Desmond Graham provides us with an astonishing amount of information.' Stephen Spender 'extremely well-done . . It is written with authority and it will be standard.' Peter Levi 'sumptuously evocative' John Carey

Angus Wilson was a critic, lecturer and man of letters. Pre-eminently though he was a novelist, indeed, in the words of Paul Bailey 'no other novelist of his generation offered as complete and detailed a portrait of English society.' His first volume of stories, The Wrong Set (1949) - reissued in Faber Finds - launched Wilson as one of the most controversial, colourful and entertaining figures on the post-war literary scene, and he rapidly developed into a major novelist, maturing from enfant terrible to elder statesman in the process. Margaret Drabble's biography traces the influences of his bizarrely extended family, his years as a librarian at the British Museum - interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park - and his unexpected liberation as a writer. It portrays the dizzying progress of a writer and enthusiast whose work was at the forefront of English fiction for the second-half of the twentieth-century: above all it is a portrait of an artist of enormous courage, a man who confronted challenge to the very end. In his later years he became both influence and mentor for a younger generation of writers, including Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain and Margaret Drabble herself. Margaret Drabble knew Angus Wilson from the late 1960s and her biography is enriched with personal knowledge and recollections. 'He has been fortunate in his biographer . . . Altogether, with the assistance and consent of Tony Garrett, the dedicatee and second hero of the book, she has given a minute, intimate and candid account . . . of Wilson's hectic life.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books 'A solid tribute of scholarship and affection' Penelope Fitzgerald, Independent 'No one interested in the story of modern fiction can fail to find this life fascinating. Its virtues - a bright, crowded canvas, warmth, a witty, polished style - are those of Wilson's novels . . . Through it all shines so human a picturer of a courageous, doubting, eccentric, driven writer.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a painter, poet, illustrator, dramatist, and most famously the creator of the "Gormenghast "trilogy. Very much his own man, and charmingly so, neither as an artist nor as a painter did he belong to any school or movement; his work was distinctive and peculiar to him. He was not a loner though, his friends included Graham Greene, Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and Walter de la Mare. His marriage to one of his students, Maeve Gilmore was a happy one, too. Parkinson's disease tragically curtailed his life.

Malcolm Yorke's biography was written with the full co-operation of the Peake family who granted him access to letters, photographs and drawings never previously published.

'Yorke, aware of the many interpretations that have been imposed on Peake's trilogy, does not burden the reader with more. He catches, instead, through apt summary, the wide range of opinion on Peake's achievement, as poet, novelist, painter and illustrator.' Frances Spalding, "Times Literary Supplement "

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'But his book goads the reader to search out Peake, and what more could that unique man or his family ask?' John McEwen, "Spectator"

'Most valuably, the book is generously illustrated with examples of the works discussed. There will never be a clearer explication of Peake's progress as a visual artist.' Michael Swanwick, "Washington Post "

The description 'definitive' is too easily used, but Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov merits it unhesitatingly. To quote no less an authority than Michael Frayn: 'With question the definitive biography of Chekhov, and likely to remain so for a very long time to come. Donald Rayfield starts with the huge advantage of much new material that was prudishly suppressed under the Soviet regime, or tactfully ignored by scholars. But his mastery of all the evidence, both old and new - a massive archive - is magisterial, his background knowledge of the period is huge; his Russian is sensitive to every colloquial nuance of the day, and his tone is sure. He captures a likeness of the notoriously elusive Chekhov which at last begins to seem recognisably human - and even more extraordinary.' Chekhov's life was short, he was only forty-four when he died, and dogged with ill-health but his plays and short stories assure him of his place in the literary pantheon. Here is a biography that does him full justice, in short, unapologetically to repeat that word 'definitive'. 'I don't remember any monograph by a Western scholar on a Russian author having such success. . . Nikita Mikhalkov said that before this book came out we didn't know Chekhov. . . The author doesn't invent, add or embellish anything . . . Rayfield is motivated by the Westerner's urge not ot hold information back, however grim it may be.' Anatoli Smelianski, Director of Moscow Arts Theatre School 'It is hard to imagine another book about Chekhov after this one by Donald Rayfield.' Arthur Miller, Sunday Times 'Donald Rayfield's exemplary biography draws on a daunting array of material inacessible or ignored by his predecessors.' Nikolai Tolstoy, The Literary Review 'Donald Rayfield, Chekhov's best and definitive biographer.' William Boyd, Guardian

Boswell's life of Johnson is incontestably one of the great biographies in the English language. And yet not even it can give a completely rounded portrait. It is for that reason Hugh Kingsmill hit upon the idea of assembling this alternative anthology: Samuel Johnson as recalled diversely by those including Johnson himself, Mrs Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, Anna Seward (not flattering) and Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister. Here is an example from the latter: 'One Sunday morning, as I was walking with him in Twickenham meadows, he began his antics both with his feet and his hands, with the latter as if he was holding the reins of a horse like a jockey on full speed. But to describe the positions of his feet is a strange task; sometimes he would make the back part of his heels to touch, sometimes his toes, as he was aiming at making the form of a triangle, at least the two sides of one. Though indeed, whether these were his gestures on this particular occasion in Twickenham meadows I do not recollect, it is so long since, but I well remember that they were so extraordinary that men, women and children gathered round him laughing. At last we sat down on some logs of wood by the river side, and they nearly dispersed; when he pulled out of his pocket Grotius De Veritate Religionis, over which he seesawed at such a violent rate as to excite the curiosity of some people at distance to come and see what was the matter with him.' This is richly readable and informative volume offering an endlessly fascinating conspectus of the Great Man. It is being reissued at the same time as Hugh Kingsmill biography of Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson was first published in 1934. It is being reissued to mark the 300th anniversary of Johnson's birth and the sixtieth anniversary of Hugh Kingsmill's death. In the words of Richard Ingrams, 'Samuel Johnson was the only biography of Kingsmill's written in a spirit of sympathy with his subject and it is for that reason the most successful of his books and must rank as one of the best short biographies of Johnson. Kingsmill had much in common with Johnson. He expressed himself best in company with others and found writing an arduous task; the circumstances of his life were unfortunate and he had the same habit as Johnson of almost courting discomfort.' Also being reissued at the same time is Hugh Kingsmill's anthology Johnson without Boswell.

Hugh Kingsmill should be better known. Here is a striking passage from Richard Ingrams' God's Apology. 'In Malcolm's (Muggeridge) study there was a row of books more thumbed and battered than the rest and a rather blurred photograph showing a man striding through a park, his arm swung forward, his air confident and jaunty. Malcolm called him Hughie. In his conversation he referred to him constantly, with great affection and in a manner quite unlike his usual rather disparaging one when talking of his friends. He seemed to be almost the only man in Malcolm's life of whom he had not a harsh word to say.' Hugh Kingsmill was a novelist, a biographer of note and a talker of outstanding verve and brilliance. He died in 1949 and to mark the sixtieth anniversary Faber Finds is reissuing Michael Holroyd's biography. It was Michael Holroyd's first book, originally published in 1964. 'A remarkably good book .' John Davenport, The Observer 'It is a positive pleasure to recommend Michael Holroyd's splendid biography of this exceptional personality.' Kay Dick, BBC 'The World of Books' 'A well-written study of a laughing, witty, clearly lovable man behind whose wreathed smiles despair lurked.' Anthony Hern, Evening Standard 'An admirably balanced and complete portrait, the criticism fair, the likeness true . . . I congratulate the author on a remarkably good book.' Hesketh Pearson, in a letter ' . . . impressively authoritative . . . entrancing and singularly profound.' William Gerhardie, The Spectator

Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.

A. E. Housman, romantic poet and classical scholar, is best-known as the author of A Shropshire Lad and the meticulous editor of Manilius, the Latin poet of astronomy. In this first full biography, Richard Perceval Graves convincingly reconciles the two apparently conflicting sides of Housman's personality, and reassesses the reputation of a man who was something of a mystery even to his closest friends. 'This is bound to become the standard life.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Dispassionate and well-researched.' Philip Larkin, Guardian

Brilliant, original, funny and moving -- a vivid portrait of Montaigne, showing how his ideas gave birth to our modern sense of our inner selves, from Shakespeare's plays to the dilemmas we face today.
How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love -- such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy?
This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment -- and in search of themselves.
This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boetie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers -- who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'

"From the Hardcover edition."

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.

At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio. This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorized biography and published here in English for the first time. In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio's tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of his public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge. Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading, his shyness and his passion for mountaineering, and recounts his wartime experience as a partisan and the terrible price it exacted from him and his comrades. Though we glimpse his later life as a writer, the story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz owing to his sudden death. In The Last Interview, Levi the man, the witness, the chemist and the writer all unite to offer us a story which is also a window onto history. These conversations shed new light on Levi's life and will appeal to the many readers of this most eloquent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.

The lyric perfection of the works of Alfred Tennyson, one of the greatest Victorian poets, and the apparent ease with which he wrote them, long obscured the disparity between the unruffled surface of many of his poems and his deeply disturbed life.

Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was born, was made miserable by drunkenness, drug addiction, threats of violence, melodramatic disinheritances, and above all by the fear of madness. He found an anodyne for his unhappiness in the composition of poetry, and was so successful in this refuge from the bewildering complexities of his life that he eventually became Poet Laureate and the most famous of living writers.

Until he was forty years old the belief that he suffered from inherited epilepsy kept Tennyson unsettled, neurotic about money, immature in his relations with women, and apprehensive of marriage. It was a belief that gave shape to some of his finest poetry.

At the end of his life Tennyson's wife and son constructed a public facade for him of irreproachable normality and respectability. Robert Bernard Martin was the first biographer to go behind the mask of the troubled poet to investigate his black-tempered morbidity, and neurotic secrecy about his private life. More importantly, it often reveals the sources of the successes and failures of the foremost Victorian poet.

From many thousands of letters by Tennyson, his family, and his friends, as well as much other unpublished material, Robert Bernard Martin has distilled a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of Tennyson, both as his contemporaries saw him and as he was in private.

'Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart will stand as one of the great literary biographies of this century.' A. N. Wilson, "The Spectator"

It was as a small girl in Lincolnshire that Emily Sellwood first saw the boy Alfred Tennyson. Nearly thirty years later, in the year he became Poet Laureate, they married. What kept them apart and what eventually brought them together has never before been fully explored.

This major biography radically alters the picture of the poet's relationship with his wife, establishing in detail the person Emily Tennyson was. It is the story of a remarkable family as well as a remarkable woman, bringing into the foreground a neglected and often misunderstood character a century after her death.

'Meeting Emily Tennyson in the pages of Thwaite's enthralling book is pure delight.' "Sunday Express"

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""'A finely and deeply researched work, and clearly a labour of love ...She tells an ever absorbing story, and throws much light on that fascinating social area in which high art and worldly power meet.' "The Times"

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""'This fat and well-documented book will quickly establish its place in bibliographies of essential Tennyson background.' "Literary Review"

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'A magnificent, surprising biography.' Lynne Truss, "Mail on Sunday"

The two quiet lives are Dorothy Osborne, writer of the famous love letters to William Temple, and Thomas Gray, poet, Cambridge don and friend of Horace Walpole. They lived a century apart, but as David Cecil shows, were temperamentally akin. Both were reserved, introspective and prone to melancholy: both appeared awkward and difficult save to the few to whom they opened their hearts: both commanded a fund of humour and imagination and possessed an instinctive feeling for style: and both enjoyed an inner life which was vivid, strong and exciting. David Cecil's subtle and sympathetic study of two remarkable natures is a sustained piece of exquisite scholarship which reads as engagingly now as it did when first published in 1948.

Unfinished Adventure, published in 1933, is Evelyn Sharp's autobiography. It is a remarkable book recounting a remarkable life. Born in 1869, Evelyn Sharp was the sister of the folk song and dance expert, Cecil Sharp. A journalist, writer, pacifist and suffragist, Evelyn Sharp writes vividly about all aspects of her life: her school-days, Paris in 1890 , the Yellow Book, the Manchester Guardian, her conversion to Suffragism, her imprisonment in Holloway, her war work, her relief work in Germany and Russia in the nineteen-twenties, and finally, in her own words, 'The Greatest of All Adventures': the day she completed this book she married the campaigning writer and journalist, H. W. Nevinson. A. S. Byatt has described Evelyn Sharp as 'perspicacious, witty and a very good writer.' Evelyn Sharp and her autobiography deserve to be better known Faber Finds is very pleased to be reissuing An Unfinished Adventure at the same time as the Manchester University Press publish Angela John's biography, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955

Max Beerbohm is one of those figures, like Dr Johnson and Oscar Wilde, as well known as a personality as he is an artist. He was a superb parodist and cartoonist, and he was the leading wit and dandy of the Edwardian age. His very first book was boldly entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm (a collection of seven essays). He wrote mainly in miniature forms but his most famous work is his only novel Zuleika Dobson, a comic fantasy about undergraduate life at Oxford in the 1890s. David Cecil was appointed by Max Beerbohm to be his biographer. The choice could not have been more apt. Granted access to his private papers, David Cecil provides an intimate portrait of an odd, brilliant and most lovable human being, who was also a deeper and more considerable character than his facade betrayed. Besides being a picture of a man, this book is the picture of an age. In it the literary, theatrical and fashionable worlds of the 1890s and of Edward VII's reign appear in vivid detail as seen through the amused but penetrating eyes of Max: he knew everyone worth knowing in that era and had something to say about each of them. 'He has assembled all the available facts in a way to leave us grateful.' Evelyn Waugh, Sunday Times 'Here, exhibiting a small, delightful talent, is a large delightful book.' J. I. M. Stewart, Listener

First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book. For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times

Originally published in 1969. In the seventeenth century neither the literary genre nor the term 'autobiography' existed but we see in seventeenth-century literature many kinds of autobiographical writings, to which their authors gave such titles as 'Journal of the Life of Me, Confessions, etc. This work is a study of nearly two hundred of these, published and unpublished, which together represent a very varied group of writings. The book begins with an examination of the rise of autobiography as a genre during the Renaissance. It discusses seventeenth-century autobiographical writings under two main headings - 'religious', where the autobiographies are grouped according to the denomination of their writer, and 'secular', where a wide variety of writings is examined, including accounts of travel and of military and political life, as well as more personal accounts. Autobiographies by women are treated separately, and the author shows that they in general have a deeper revelation of sentiments and more subtle self-analyses than is found in comparable works by men. Sources and influences are recorded and also the essential historical details of each work. This book gives a critical analysis of the autobiographies as literary works and suggests relationships between them and the culture and society of their time. Review of the original publication: "...a contribution to cultural history which is of quite exceptional merit. Its subject is of great intrinsic interest and manifest importance and Professor Delany has treated it with exemplary thoroughness, lucidity, and intelligence." Lionel Trilling

First published in 1994, Paul Binding's portrait of Eudora Welty is being reissued to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth. Eudora Welty was a Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of numerous literary friendships and awards. She was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth-century. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora Welty was brought up in the harsh American South when it was bedevilled both by the Depression and racial discrimination. Her acclaimed novels and short stories however are imbued with compassion and optimism, while also revealing her extraordinary gift for inhabiting the inner world of her characters. Paul Binding knew Eudora Welty, and in this book he draws on the many conversations he had with both her and her friends and fellow writers. The Still Moment presents a critical portrait of a remarkable mind and a profoundly humanist writer.

Anne Bronte, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Bronte sisters, remains a best-selling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels - Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - and her poetry belies the quiet, yet courageous girl who often lived in the shadows of her more celebrated sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontes, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. This revealing new biography opens Anne's most private life to a new audience and shows the true nature of her relationships with her siblings, in particular with her sister Charlotte.

The Wild Garden is both an autobiographical essay on the creative process and a remarkable personal account of the circumstances surrounding the nervous crisis that impelled Angus Wilson to become a writer at the age of thirty-six. Examining specific incidents, characters, places and recurring symbols in his life and work, notably the wild garden itself, Wilson analyses the links between his own life crisis and the theme of liberation by self-realization that was to be central to all his novels. 'The Wild Garden is, quite simply, one of the finest accounts of the creative process by a recent writer that I know. Here Angus Wilson looks at the springs of writing in a way that all writers can recognize, and all readers appreciate as a way into the brilliant, discovering imagination that lay behind his major novels.' Malcolm Bradbury

In Humphrey Carpenter's own words, 'This is the story of the longest-ever literary party, which went on in Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, throughout the 1920s.'

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""'This book', to continue to quote Carpenter himself, 'is chiefly a collage of Left-Bank expatriate life as it was experienced by the Hemingway generation - "The Lost Generation," as Gertrude Stein named it in a famous remark to Hemingway.'

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""There are brief portraits of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Clifford Barney and Sylvia Beach, who moved to Paris before the First World War and provided vital introductions for the exiles of the 1920s. The main narrative, however, concerns the years 1921 to 1928 because these saw the arrival and departure of Hemingway and most of his Paris associates.

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""'He is a compelling guide, catching the kind of idiosyncratic detail or incident that holds the readers' attention and maintains a cracking pace. Anyone wanting an introduction to the constellation of talent that made the Left Bank in Paris during the Twenties a second Greenwich Village would find this a useful and inspiring book.' "Times Educational Supplement "

Dennis Potter's death in 1994 deprived British television of its most controversial figure. Potter was a prolific writer of genius. Yet while his subversive television plays, such as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, scandalized and delighted the nation, they also made him the butt of the tabloids, who nicknamed him 'Dirty Den' for his 1989 serial Blackeyes. Humphrey Carpenter, acclaimed biographer of Tolkien, Auden, Pound, Britten and Robert Runcie, interviewed everyone who came close to Potter, and had exclusive access to Potter's archives, including the many unmade television and film scripts. Carpenter portrays a very different Potter from the aggressive public image: a deeply shy and reclusive man, who was psychologically as well as physically scarred by the illness which struck him down at the age of twenty-six. Potter was a man with a vast interest in sex but also a terrible loathing of it, thanks to an appalling experience he suffered in childhood. Potter was a man much gossiped about. Carpenter's remarkable biography establishes the extraordinary truth behind the rumours; describes Potter's strange, obsessive relationships with women such as Gina Bellman, who played Blackeyes; and gives a vivid portrait of the backstage dramas and fights behind Potter's screen triumphs. 'What is valuable about this book is that it reveals Potter's real private life, which barely features in his plays ... A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man: his generosity and cruelty, his coarseness and tenderness, and the thwarted sexual yearning that underlay everything.' Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph

'This is a book about the magazines I have edited. I have written it in order to describe what they were like, and what literary journalism was like, and to do honour to the writers I worked with.' So begins Karl Miller's understated, droll and lucid retrospect of English post-war literary culture. Dark Horses is the vade mecum and memoir of an eminent literary critic and teacher, who also edited several of the most influential literary magazines of his time, and who founded the most influential literary journal of our time, the London Review of Books. It is the testament of a watchful and undeceived intelligence, of wide and sometimes surprising sympathies, as observant about football as about politics and letters. In its feeling for outsiders as well as its understanding of insiders, Dark Horses fulfills the promises of its title. 'Frank Kermode has written of "the good writing that cannot help eliminating truth from autobiography." Karl Miller comes marvellously close to bringing the two together.' Financial Times 'Miller's prose is elegant, spare and unforced. He has the true art of the memoirist.' Jonathan Bate