SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come' Sunday Times 'Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity ... A moving, fascinating biography' The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain's most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes's lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own..

The son of Jewish immigrants, war correspondent Cecil Brown (1907-1987) was a member of CBS' esteemed Murrow Boys. Expelled from Italy and Singapore for reporting the facts, he witnessed the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and the war in North Africa, and survived the sinking of the British battleship HMS Repulse by a Japanese submarine. Back in the U.S., he became an influential commentator during the years when Americans sought a dispassionate voice to make sense of complex developments. He was one of the first journalists to champion civil rights, to condemn Senator McCarthy's tactics (and President Eisenhower's reticence), and to support Israel's creation. Although he won every major broadcast journalism award, his accomplishments have been largely overlooked by historians. This first biography of Brown chronicles his career in journalism and traces his contributions to the profession.

This critical analysis of twelve of the plays of James Bridie (1885-1951) illustrates that throughout Bridie's work there exists a philosophical continuity which can be traced through three stages of moral awareness and which when recognized goes far in defining Bridie's genius. Bridie, as the study attempts to show, was essentially a moralist, and his plays are in a special sense morality plays; thus his original use of religious myth is explored, particularly his use of the myth of the fall from innocence. Bridie's first play, The Switchback uses the myth of Adam's temptation and fall to tell the story of a Scottish physician's struggle to meet both self and social responsibilities. Four other plays, Tobias and the Angel, The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lampur, Marriage Is No Joke, and The Black Eye, again deal with the Fall, this time with innocent Adams who remain oblivious of the demons tempting them to leave their particular Garden of Eden. The discussion of Tobias also introduces Bridie's use of the Prodigal Son story. The disillusionment of experienced Adams is studied in the late plays; the disillusioned Adam of the last Play, The Baikie Charivari, seems to be a modern-day Pontius Pilate. Aside from exploring the mythical content of the plays, Helen L. Luyben defends Bridie as a craftsman against accusations that he was a bungler. She maintains that the structure of the plays is not diffuse but carefully plotted, as is apparent in the conscious use of myth (supported by a metaphysical use of language) and in the common structural techniques found throughout the plays. As Bridie's morality goes beyond the limits of logic, so his structure disregards the limitations of realistic drama, demanding dramatic forms-farce and fantasy-which will encompass the illogical and portray a higher reality than the realistic form. Thus his language operates both on a literal and poetic plane. Finally, Bridie's moral affinity with Shaw and Ibsen is explored, not with the intention of tracing literal borrowing, but to clarify Bridie's philosophical and dramatic intention.

'Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny' Sunday Times 'A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page' Morning Star 'A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny' Joanne Limburg 'Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers' Neue Zurcher Zeitung Most stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Originally published in 1919, this book contains a biography of the life and times of Zygmunt Krasinski, known in his day as 'the Anonymous Poet'. Gardner provides an introduction to Krasinski's importance to Poland for an English-speaking audience, drawing on Krasinski's own letters and works to illuminate his patriotism, mysticism and character. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Polish literature and European history.

During his 1920s heyday, Arnold Bennett was one of Britain's most celebrated writers. As the author of The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger he was a household name, writing just as much for the common man as London's literati. His face was plastered over theatre hoardings and the sides of West End omnibuses. His life represents the ultimate rags-to-riches story of a man who 'banged on the door of Fortune like a weekly debt collector' as one of his obituaries so vividly put it. Yet for all his success, few were aware how cursed Bennett felt by his life-long stutter and other debilitating character traits. In the years running up to his death in 1931, his affairs were close to collapse as he fought a losing battle on three fronts: with his estranged wife; with his disenchanted mistress; and from a literary perspective with Virginia Woolf. As the first full length biography of Bennett since 1974, the work draws on a wealth of unpublished diaries and letters to shed new light on a personality who can be considered a 'Lost Icon' of early Twentieth Century Britain.

Few of the many romantic figures of the nineties have weathered the changing schools of literary taste as well as Ernest Dowson, in whose verse there is found a timeless, ingratiating charm and enduring interest. This biography is only incidentally a critical appraisal of Dowson's achievements but attempts to give a more completely rounded picture of the man than we have had before it. The book is based on a great deal of new material, which clears up many misinterpretations of Dowson's personality. This consists of unpublished letters from various sources, including twelve from Oscar Wilde that have not been printed before and detailed information gleaned by the author in interviews and in correspondence with persons who knew the poet intimately. To modern readers versed in psychological explanations of behavior, Dowson's story unwinds in a foredoomed pattern: the talented child of neurotic parents, the maladjusted boy at Oxford, the discontented young man in London, his curious infatuation for the child Adelaide, the brief association with prominent literary leaders in the Rhymers' Club and on the short-lived Savoy, and then his mother's suicide, his homelessness, poverty, aimless wandering abroad, the escape in drinking, finally death. Yet with it all, the insatiable urge to weave out his dreams in facile words which now form a unique and permanent contribution to English poetry. From this book Dowson emerges as a tragically interesting figure. The biography gives as much of his story as probably will ever be known, and as such takes an important place among the lives of English poets.

Aristocrat, literary celebrity, 'Rose Queen', devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast - Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is re-told here in a dazzling new biography. Vita Sackville-West was a woman who defied categorisation. She was the dispossessed girl whose lonely childhood at Knole inspired enduring feats of imagination, the celebrated author and poet, the adored and affectionate wife whose marriage included passionate homosexual affairs (most famously with Virginia Woolf ), and the recluse who found in nature and her garden at Sissinghurst Castle solace from the contradictions of her extraordinary life. In this dazzling new biography, Matthew Dennison traces these complexities, depicting a prolific, radical, sensitive and uncompromising figure in all her depth.

Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Manhood for Amateurs and Moonglow, returns with a collection of heartfelt, humorous and insightful essays on the meaning of fatherhood. You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you and if you are lucky they even, on occasion, manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough What are you allowed to talk about with your children? When to step in with advice, when to let them make their own mistakes? It's more complicated than you think. Somehow you muddle through. In this heartfelt, humorous and wise book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon attempts to weigh in on difficult conversations with his children, on everything from texting girls to death. But it is when he hangs back that he catches them transforming into their own people. What emerges is a father's deep respect for his children's passions and for their bravery in the face of conformity. Whether you know the joy and struggles of being a father, or were shaped by one, you will find a home in these stunning essays.

Fiona MacCarthy makes a breakthrough in interpreting Byron's life and poetry drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive. She brings a fresh eye to his early years: his childhood in Scotland, embattled relations with his mother, the effect of his deformed foot on his development. She traces his early travels in the Mediterranean and the East, throwing light on his relationships with adolescent boys - a hidden subject in earlier biographies. While paying due attention to the compelling tragicomedy of Byron's marriage, his incestuous love for his half-sister Augusta and the clamorous attention of his female fans, she gives a new importance to his close male friendships, in particular that with his publisher John Murray. She tells the full story of their famous disagreement, ending as a rift between them as Byron's poetry became more recklessly controversial. Byron was a celebrity in his own lifetime, becoming a 'superstar' in 1812, after the publication of Childe Harold. The Byron legend grew to unprecedented proportions after his death in the Greek War of Independence at the age of thirty-six. The problem for a biographer is sifting the truth from the sentimental, the self-serving and the spurious. Fiona MacCarthy has overcome this to produce an immaculately researched biography, which is also her refreshing personal view.

Counterculture icon and best-selling author of the anti-authoritarian novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey said he was ""too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie."" It's All a Kind of Magic is the first biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing, magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson. A child of the Depression, Kesey was born in 1935 to a migrant farming family that settled in Oregon during World War II. Based on meticulous research and many interviews with friends and family, Rick Dodgson's biography documents Kesey's early life, from his time growing up in Oregon as a farm boy and wrestling champion through his college years, his first drug experiences, and the writing of his most famous books. While a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey worked the night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital, where he earned extra money taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs for medical studies. Soon he and his bohemian crowd of friends were using the same substances to conduct their own experiments, exploring the frontiers of their minds and testing the boundaries of their society. With the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey moved to La Honda, California, in the foothills of San Mateo County, creating a scene that Hunter S. Thompson remembered as the ""world capital of madness."" There, Kesey and his growing band of Merry Prankster friends began hosting psychedelic parties and living a ""hippie"" lifestyle before anyone knew what that meant. Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test mythologised Kesey's adventures in the 1960s. Illustrated with rarely seen photographs, It's All a Kind of Magic depicts a precocious young man brimming with self-confidence and ambition who-through talent, instinct, and fearless spectacle-made his life into a performance, a wild magic act that electrified American and world culture.

Isaac Taylor (1787 1865) was known as Isaac Taylor of Stanford Rivers, to distinguish him from his father, Isaac Taylor of Ongar, engraver and dissenting minister. He, his brother Jefferys, and their sisters Ann and Jane, were all writers, and their mother was the well-known 'Mrs Taylor of Ongar', some of whose books are also reissued in this series. The younger Isaac felt drawn to the Church of England, and made a name for himself with studies of the Church Fathers and the classics (he is said to have coined the word 'patristic'). This two-volume collection of writings by three generations of the Taylor family was compiled and published in 1867 by the Isaac Taylor of the next generation. Volume 2 contains essays and verses by the four siblings, their father Isaac, and a cousin, Jemima, of which the most notable is the long short story 'Display' by Jane Taylor."

This two-volume biography of William Wordsworth (1770 1850) was published in 1851 by his nephew, Christopher (1807 85), a scholar who later became bishop of Lincoln. The introductory chapter argues against the presentation of a 'life', or a critical assessment of Wordsworth's works. The poet felt strongly that the life was in the works, and that they should 'plead their own cause before the tribune of Posterity'. Nevertheless, an elucidation of the facts of Wordsworth's life would - precisely because his poems are so personal - help the reader to understand his verse; and to be best understood, it should be studied chronologically, for which a 'biographical commentary' would be essential. Christopher Wordsworth, having agreed to undertake this task, asked his uncle for a 'brief sketch of the most prominent circumstances of his life'; the remainder of Volume 1 takes the biography up to 1810."

This two-volume biography of William Wordsworth (1770 1850) was published in 1851 by his nephew, Christopher (1807 85), a scholar who later became bishop of Lincoln. The introductory chapter argues against the presentation of a 'life', or a critical assessment of Wordsworth's works. The poet felt strongly that the life was in the works, and that they should 'plead their own cause before the tribune of Posterity'. Nevertheless, an elucidation of the facts of Wordsworth's life would - precisely because his poems are so personal - help the reader to understand his verse; and to be best understood, it should be studied chronologically, for which a 'biographical commentary' would be essential. Christopher Wordsworth, having agreed to undertake this task, describes in Volume 2 the family's move to Rydal Mount in 1811, and continues to 1850. An appendix provides documents on the history of the family."

A Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times 'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail 'A masterful portrait' The Times 'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review 'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.

As the year 1386 began, Geoffrey Chaucer was a middle-aged bureaucrat and sometime poet, living in London and enjoying the perks that came with his close connections to its booming wool trade. When it ended, he was jobless, homeless, out of favour with his friends and living in exile. Such a reversal might have spelled the end of his career; but instead, at the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to 'maken vertu of necessitee' and keep writing. The result - The Canterbury Tales - was a radically new form of poetry that would make his reputation, bring him to a national audience, and preserve his work for posterity. In The Poet's Tale, Paul Strohm brings Chaucer's world to vivid life, from the streets and taverns of crowded medieval London to rural seclusion in Kent, and reveals this crucial year as a turning point in the fortunes of England's most important poet.

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2017 'Against anything I had ever been told was possible, I was turning white. On the surface of my skin, a miracle was quietly brewing . . .' Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three bedroom blonde-brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's life is just like all the other Aussie kids on her street. Except for this one, glaring, inescapably obvious thing. From one of Australia's most exciting writers, and the author of the multi-award-winning FOREIGN SOIL, comes THE HATE RACE: a powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.

In the autumn of 1915, in a "slightly heroic mood", E.M. Forster arrived in Alexandria, full of lofty ideals as a volunteer for the Red Cross. Yet most of his time was spent exploring "the magic, antiquity and complexity" of the place in order to cope with living in what he saw as a "funk-hole". With a novelist's pen, he brings to life the fabled, romantic city of Alexander the Great, capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, beacon of light and culture symbolised by the Pharos, where the doomed love affair of Antony and Cleopatra was played out and the greatest library the world has ever known was built. Threading 3,000 years of history with vibrant strands of literature and punctuating the narrative with his own experiences, Forster immortalised Alexandria, painting an incomparable portrait of the great city and, inadvertently, himself.

One of the most celebrated and prolific authors of the Victorian era, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) requested that his autobiography be published posthumously. The two-volume work, first published in 1883 and reissued here in the second edition of that year, recounts his childhood, successful career at the Post Office, and multiple achievements as a writer. Well received by the critics of the time, the work reveals the incredible discipline that enabled Trollope to write forty-seven novels in the course of his career. Of particular interest to literary scholars, the reflections on his early life show how his unhappy childhood and his father's financial problems influenced his fiction. Volume 1 covers Trollope's education and early Post Office career, before discussing his first authorial efforts. Two of Trollope's non-fiction works, North America (1862) and Australia and New Zealand (1873), have also been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.

One of the most celebrated and prolific authors of the Victorian era, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) requested that his autobiography be published posthumously. The two-volume work, first published in 1883 and reissued here in the second edition of that year, recounts his childhood, successful career at the Post Office, and multiple achievements as a writer. Well received by the critics of the time, the work reveals the incredible discipline that enabled Trollope to write forty-seven novels in the course of his career. Of particular interest to literary scholars, the reflections on his early life show how his unhappy childhood and his father's financial problems influenced his fiction. Volume 2 goes into greater detail on Trollope's writing technique, and includes his thoughts on fellow writers and literary criticism. Two of Trollope's non-fiction works, North America (1862) and Australia and New Zealand (1873), have also been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.