Hunter Davies' childhood lived amongst the post-war dirt and grime of Carlisle was immediately hailed as a classic memoir from one of Britain's foremost columnists of the past half century. The Co-op's Got Bananas! left our protagonist at the cusp of working for one of the world's greatest newspapers - The Sunday Times. In this much-anticipated sequel, Hunter now looks back across five decades of successful writing to reflect on his colourful memories of the living in London during the height of the Swinging Sixties, becoming editor of Britain's first colour weekend supplement The Sunday Times magazine; befriending the Beatles; and interviewing (and partying with) the biggest names in television, film and theatre of the day. Hunter brings the story full circle to reflect on his years spent with the love of his life - the bestselling writer Margaret Forster, who sadly passed away in February 2016. This will not only be a colourful and enjoyable memoir of what it was like to be at the epicentre of Britain's artistic heart, but also an emotional, heart-felt tribute to family, friends and colleagues. For those captivated by The Co-op's Got Bananas!, this sequel is a must read.

F.R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. His outspoken and confrontational work has often divided opinion and continues to generate interest as students and critics revisit his highly influential texts.

Looking closely at a representative selection of Leavis's work, Richard Storer outlines his thinking on key topics such as:

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• close reading
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• higher education.

Exploring the responses and engaging with the controversies generated by Leavis's work, this clear, authoritative guide highlights how Leavis remains of critical significance to twenty-first-century study of literature and culture.

This pioneering effort links history and personality by pairing intellectual friends, most notably Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, but also Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch, Theodore Roethke and Robert Heilman. Chronologically the essays range from the early 1830s, when Carlyle and Mill discovered each other, to 1975, when Lionel Trilling died.

The essay that gives this volume its title is also the most ambitious. Alexander examines Trilling and Howe in relation to one another and to Jewish quandaries, Henry James, politics and fiction, antisemitic writers, literary radicals, 1960s insurrectionists, the state of Israel, the nature of friendship itself.

The chapter on the friendships (and ex-friendships) of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell, views their stories against the background of the modern conflict between reason and feeling, positivism and imagination. Though some relationships began in adversity, they developed into friendships. This happened with Roethke and Heilman, and with Eliot and Deutsch. As a young woman, Eliot disparaged Jews as candidates for "extermination," but her friendship with the Talmudic scholar Deutsch changed her into one of the major Judeophiles of the Victorian period. The quartet of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell shows how quickly-formed literary friendships, especially those based on hunger for disciples, can dissolve into ex-friendships. This volume offers new perspectives on leading literary figures and their relationship, and shows how friendship influences art.

Down and Out in Paris and London was George Orwell’s first published book. It is at once a very personal account, and a vivid exposé of hard lives weighed down by poverty in France and England between the wars.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by writer Lara Feigel.

Towards the end of the 1920s, whilst living in Paris, George Orwell’s few remaining funds are stolen and he quickly falls into a life of severe poverty. Living hand to mouth, he shares squalid lodgings with Russian-born Boris and finds tedious and back-breaking work washing up in the bowels of Paris restaurant kitchens. On his return to England, he lives as a tramp, finding occasional shelter in often dangerous doss houses.

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.

'A deeply intelligent and searching book, one that makes you re-consider the narrative of your own life and reframe the story you tell yourself' Hilary Mantel A Guardian reader's Best Book of 2018 "There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class ... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?" Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what itmeans to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times. 'I was overwhelmed by this book. I felt I was reading the story of my life' Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy 'A book about self-invention and belonging' Colm Toibin

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writings Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless life in the cities, neighborhoods, and rooms where he lived and worked, exploring how each new place left its enduring mark on the writer and his craft. Poe wrote short stories, poems, journalism, and editorials with urban readers in mind. He witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond and among enslaved workers in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, he saw an expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. At a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, he tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later in what is now the Bronx. Poe's urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experiences living among the soldiers, slaves, and immigrants of the American city. Featuring evocative photographs by Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd challenges the popular conception of Poe as an isolated artist living in a world of his own imagination, detached from his physical surroundings. The Poe who emerges here is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by the cities where he lived, longing for a stable home.

'A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography' - Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: The Biography 'Anyone who loves [Dostoevsky's] novels will be fascinated by this book' - Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Dostoevsky's life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognised as among the finest ever written. In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the author's work with the historical context to form an illuminating and often surprising whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the reader in a grand vista of Dostoevsky's world: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsar's fortress to the refined salons of St Petersburg. Along the way, Christofi relates the stories of the three women whose lives were so deeply intertwined with Dostoevsky's: the consumptive widow Maria; the impetuous Polina who had visions of assassinating the Tsar; and the faithful stenographer Anna, who did so much to secure his literary legacy. Reading between the lines of his fiction, Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life - and literary stardom - not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.

The ground-breaking work of the poet who paved the way for generations of women writers, in a new selection by her daugher and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton When Anne Sexton took her own life in October 1974, she left behind a body of work which had already, in less than two decades of writing, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, established her as one of the foremost voices of her generation, and shocked America by breaking multiple taboos of subject matter, from insanity, depression and addiction to menstruation, adultery and the figure of the witch. Sexton's name is legendary. Her poetry is read around the world, translated into over thirty languages, and in her own country remains a touchstone for poets and readers looking for rawness of perception, vitality of expression, confessional frankness and fiery passion. Yet, incredibly, there has been no new UK edition of her work for decades. In Mercies, readers are provided with a resonant new selection from the writings of this natural phenomenon of a poet.

WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2021 AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY 'MUST READ' A TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK * * * * * Discover this astonishing work of fiction from award-winning, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Jason Mott. 'Powerful, timely and provocative' ABI DARE, author of GIRL WITH A LOUDING VOICE 'Jason Mott truly has written one hell of a book.' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, author of QUEENIE This is a true story. An author goes on a book tour for his new bestseller which, as people keep telling him, is one hell of a book. This is a coming-of-age story. One morning, he meets The Kid: a young Black boy who looks just like the one he keeps seeing on the news. And The Kid wants him to tell his story. This is a sad story. It's the story of a boy who spent most of his life trying to hide. And it may not be that different from the story of our author. This is a love story. But to find out why, you'll have to read this for yourself.

James Lees-Milne (1908-97) made his name as the country house expert of the National Trust and for being a versatile author. But he is now best known for the remarkable diary he kept for most of his adult life, which has been compared with that of Samuel Pepys and hailed as 'a treasure of contemporary English literature'. The first of three, this volume covers its first dozen years, beginning with his return to work for the National Trust during the Second World War, and ending with his tempestuous marriage to the exotic Alvilde Chaplin. The diary vividly portrays the hectic social life of London during the Blitz, when in the intervals between struggling to save a disintegrating architectural heritage he enjoys a dizzying variety of romantic experiences with both sexes. His descriptions of visits to harassed country-house owners are as perceptive as they are hilarious. With the war's end, the mood changes as he portrays a world of gloom and austerity. He shares the prevailing pessimism, yet during these years arranges the transfer of some of England's loveliest houses to the safe keeping of the National Trust. Finally he escapes from England to live on the Continent with his beautiful paramour, yet remains restless and dissatisfied. The diaries of James Lees-Milne were originally published in twelve volumes between 1975 and 2005. Michael Bloch, James Lees-Milne's literary executor and editor of the last five volumes of the complete work, has produced this skilful compilation from the first five volumes - including interesting new material omitted from the original publications.

Thomas Hardy Remembered assembles some 150 annotated interviews and recollections of Hardy, most of which are being reprinted for the first time. They range from close personal reflections by old friends such as Sir George Douglas, J.M. Barrie, and Edmund Gosse, to fleeting glimpses by strangers who saw Hardy at a London party or at his club. Martin Ray has selected items having the greatest literary or biographical significance, and annotated them with meticulous accuracy and a keen eye for the telling detail. As a result, the volume will be an invaluable resource to scholars who are interested not only in what concerned Hardy personally and professionally, but also in how he was perceived by others. Having these items collected in one volume reveals Hardy's contemporaneous opinions about his own writings and also makes it possible to trace the marked recurrence, over time, of certain preoccupations: ancient families, Hardy's hostility to reviewers, architecture, Roman relics, Wessex folklore and dialect, animal welfare, Napoleon, and hangings. With regard to his literary career, a portrait emerges of Hardy as the scrupulous professional, properly aware of his commercial rights, while at the same time appearing, to some who met him, unconscious of his own genius.

Emily Dickinson is among the most important of American poets, a beloved literary figure whose short, complex life continues to fascinate readers. But she was also a gardener and plant lover who studied botany and tended both a small glass conservatory and a flower garden. In Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life, Marta McDowell traces Dickinson's life as gardener and reveals the many ways in which her passion for plants is evident in her extensive collection of poems and letters. Organised seasonally, the book follows Dickinson through an entire year in the garden. Readers will learn that she forced hyacinth bulbs in winter, saved seeds in the summer, and pressed flowers year-round to include in her correspondence. They'll also find tips on how to plant a poet's garden and an annotated list of all of the plants Dickinson used. Packed with contemporary and historical photography, botanical illustrations, excerpts from Dickinson's letters, and some of her most cherished poetry, this revealing book is a must-read for Dickinson fans and a thoughtful gift for gardeners.

Agatha Christie's 'most absorbing mystery' - her own autobiography. Over the three decades since her death on 12 January 1976, many of Agatha Christie's readers and reviewers have maintained that her most compelling book is probably still her least well-known. Her candid Autobiography, written mainly in the 1960s, modestly ignores the fact that Agatha had become the best-selling novelist in history and concentrates on her fascinating private life. From early childhood at the end of the 19th century, through two marriages and two World Wars, and her experiences both as a writer and on archaeological expeditions with her second husband, Max Mallowan, Agatha shares the details of her varied and sometimes complex life with real passion and openness.

Considers the reputations and biographical portrayal of three innovative and controversial writers: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Thackeray. These anthologies of contemporary biographical material shed light on the processes at work in the establishment of a public image and a critical reputation.

'If the English people were to be set a test to justify their history and civilization by the example of one man, then it is Sir Thomas More whom they would perhaps choose.' So commented The Times in 1978 on the 500th anniversary of More's birth. Twenty-two years later, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Thomas More the patron saint of politicians and people in public life, on the basis of his 'constant fidelity to legitimate authority and . . . his intention to serve not power but the supreme ideal of justice'. In this fresh assessment of More's life and legacy, John Guy considers the factors that have given rise to such claims concerning More's significance. Who was the real Thomas More? Was he the saintly, self-possessed hero of conscience of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons or was he the fanatical, heretic-hunting torturer of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall? Which of these images of More has the greater historical veracity? And why does this man continue to fascinate, inspire and provoke us today?

Rimbaud was the original enfant terrible. A poetic genius, he destroyed all those who attempted to befriend him, most notoriously wrecking the marriage and sanity of the poet Verlaine. Having conquered the literary world of Paris, he abandoned France and in the dogdays of August 1880 he disembarked in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, a lean twenty-five-year-old Frenchman carrying only a brown suitcase fastened with four leather straps and a touch of fever. The subsequent period, the lost years , is the subject of this biographical quest.

"A great read."-Whoopi Goldberg, The View How the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divide On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro," and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America's racial divide today. Born in New York City only fifteen months apart, the Harlem-raised Baldwin and the privileged Buckley could not have been more different, but they both rose to the height of American intellectual life during the civil rights movement. By the time they met in Cambridge, Buckley was determined to sound the alarm about a man he considered an "eloquent menace." For his part, Baldwin viewed Buckley as a deluded reactionary whose popularity revealed the sickness of the American soul. The stage was set for an epic confrontation that pitted Baldwin's call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley's unabashed elitism and implicit commitment to white supremacy. A remarkable story of race and the American dream, The Fire Is upon Us reveals the deep roots and lasting legacy of a conflict that continues to haunt our politics.

One of science fiction's undisputed grandmasters, Frederik Pohl built an astonishing career that spanned more than seven decades. Along the way he won millions of readers and seemingly as many awards while producing novels, short stories, and essays that left a profound mark on the genre. In this first-of-its-kind study, Michael R. Page traces Pohl's journey as an author but also uncovers his role as a transformative figure who shaped the genre as a literary agent, book editor, and in Gardner Dozois' words, "quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived."

Elizabeth Gaskell is best known as a novelist and biographer, but she was also a lively and sensitive letter writer, with a vivacious interest in all that was going on around her. This selection from her letters, with a linking commentary, provides a biography of Gaskell largely in her own words. It is in chronological order, with special chapters devoted to her family life, her travels, her charities and her life as an author who was also a wife and mother, in a period when Victorian society and culture were undergoing major changes - especially apparent in the Manchester where she lived. She emerges as a woman of intelligence, integrity and grace, with an enchanting sense of humour, an insatiable curiosity about life, a deep regard for truth and a boundless sympathy for others. This selection by John Chapple, and assisted by John Geoffrey Sharps, was originally published in 1980. With the support of the Gaskell Society it has been reprinted without alteration, except for some new illustrations.

Nabokov's dream diary, published for the first time--and placed in biographical and literary context On October 14th, 1964, Vladimir Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, began a curious experiment. Over the next eighty days, immediately upon waking, he wrote down his dreams, following the instructions he found in An Experiment with Time by the British philosopher John Dunne. The purpose was to test the theory that time may go in reverse, so that, paradoxically, a later event may generate an earlier dream. The result--published here for the first time--is a fascinating diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams (and subsequent daytime episodes) on 118 index cards, which afford a rare glimpse of the artist at his most private. More than an odd biographical footnote, the experiment grew out of Nabokov's passionate interest in the mystery of time, which influenced many of his novels, including the late masterpiece Ada. Insomniac Dreams, edited by leading Nabokov authority Gennady Barabtarlo, presents the text of Nabokov's dream experiment, illustrated with a selection of his original index cards, and provides rich annotations and analysis that put them in the context of his life and writings. The book also includes previously unpublished records of Nabokov's dreams from his letters and notebooks and shows important connections between his fiction and private writings on dreams and time.

Bringing together insights from masculinity studies and age studies, this open access book focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer's disease. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the authors analyse the interrelations between masculinities and representations of dementia from a wide range of cultural contexts to explore it as an intensely gendered and cultural disease. They examine memoir, film, poetry and prose fiction, and look at work from a wide range of authors, including Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, to provide new insights into established narratives of dementia and explore the complex ways that the disease resists representation and narration and questions traditional views of selfhood and human development. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the ERA Gender-Net+ Project MASCAGE, the University of Graz (Center for Inter-American Studies) and the Government of Styria, Austria.

This first installment of the new multi-volume Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading recounts Dr. Alan Gribben's fascinating 45-year search for surviving volumes from the large library assembled by Twain and his family. That collection of more than 3,000 titles was dispersed through impromptu donations and abrupt public auctions, but over the years nearly a thousand volumes have been recovered. Gribben's research also encompasses many hundreds of other books, stories, essays, poems, songs, plays, operas, newspapers, and magazines with which Mark Twain was demonstrably familiar. Gribben published the original edition of Mark Twain's Library in 1980. Hailed by the eminent Twain scholar Louis J. Budd as "a superb job that will last for generations," the work nevertheless soon went out of print and for three decades has been a hard-to-find item on the rare book market. Meanwhile, over a distinguished career of writing, teaching, and research on Twain, Gribben continued to annotate, revise, and expand the content such that it has become his life's masterwork. Thoroughly revised, enlarged, and retitled, Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading now reappears, to greatly expand our comprehension of the incomparable author's reading tastes and influences. Volume I traces Twain's extensive use of public libraries. It identifies Twain's favorite works, but also reveals his strong dislikes-Chapter 10 is devoted to his "Library of Literary Hogwash," specimens of atrocious poetry and prose that he delighted in ridiculing. In describing Twain's habit of annotating his library books, Gribben reveals his methods of detecting forged autographs and marginal notes that have fooled booksellers, collectors, and libraries. The volume's 25 chapters trace from various perspectives the patterns of Twain's voracious reading and relate what he read to his own literary outpouring. A "Critical Bibliography" evaluates the numerous scholarly books and articles that have studied Twain's reading, and an index guides readers to the volume's diverse subjects. Twain enjoyed cultivating a public image as a largely unread natural talent; on occasion he even denied being acquainted with titles that he had owned, inscribed, and annotated in his own personal library. He convinced many friends and interviewers that he had no appetite for fiction, poetry, drama, or belles-lettres, yet Gribben reveals volumes of evidence to the contrary. He examines this unlettered pose that Twain affected and speculates about the reasons behind it. In reality, whether Twain was memorizing the classic writings of ancient Rome or the more contemporary works of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Tennyson-or, for that matter, quoting from the best-selling fiction and poetry of his day-he exhibited a lifelong hunger to overcome the brevity of his formal education. Several of Gribben's chapters explore the connections between Twain's knowledge of authors such as Malory, Shakespeare, Poe, and Browning, and his own literary works, group readings, and family activities. Volumes II and III of Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading will be released in 2019 and will deliver an "Annotated Catalog" arranged from A to Z, documenting in detail the staggering scope of Twain's reading. - book is one-of-a-kind, a monumental project, representing 45 years of research - scholarship of the book is impeccable, by writer internationally known in the Twain community - publisher has a much-publicized association with Alan Gribben; in 2011 we released the highly controversial NewSouth Edition of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, edited by Dr. Gribben - Twain is among our more popular 19th-century American writers, and works about him are often of literary interest