A fascinating new study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' illuminates the poet's deeply troubled personality and stormy personal life through a highly original study of his relationships. In her last published work the celebrated Coleridgean scholar, Molly Lefebure, provides profound psychological insights into Coleridge through a meticulous study of his domestic life, drawing upon a vast and unique body of knowledge gained from a lifetime's study of the poet, and making skilful use of the letters, poems and biographies of the man himself and his family and friends. The author traces the roots of Coleridge's unarguably dysfunctional personality from his earliest childhood; his position as his mother's favoured child, the loss of this status with the death of his father, and removal to the 'Bluecoat' school in London. Coleridge's narcissistic depression, flamboyance, and cold-hearted, often cruel, rejection of his family and of loving attachments in general are examined in detail. The author also explores Coleridge's careers in journalism and politics as well as poetry, in his early, heady 'jacobin' days, and later at the heart of the British wartime establishment at Malta. His virtual abandonment of his children and tragic disintegration under the influence of opium are included in the broad sweep of the book which also encompasses an examination of the lives of Coleridge's children, upon whom the manipulations of the father left their destructive mark. Molly Lefebure unravels the enigma that is Coleridge with consummate skill in a book that will bring huge enjoyment to any reader with an interest in the poet's life and times. Molly Lefebure (1919-2013) was a wartime journalist, novelist, children's author, writer on the topography of Cumbria, biographer, and independent scholar and lecturer. She is the author of two other works on the Coleridge family and a volume on the world of Thomas Hardy. Lefebure was secretary to Professor Keith Simpson (1907-1985), the renowned Home Office Pathologist and head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, with whom she worked during the Second World War. While surrounded by London's crime, grime and gruesome deaths she wrote a memoire, published as 'Evidence for the Crown' (1955), which formed the basis for the successful television drama, 'Murder on the Home Front' (2013). Having been fascinated by her work in the mortuaries, Lefebure continued at Guy's Hospital and studied drug addiction for six years, which led her to write her first biography of Coleridge ('Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium', 1974). 'Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' is the distillation of the lifetime's thought of one whom many regard as having been one of the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world. 'Molly Lefebure's insight into Coleridge's marriage is second to none. Her perception of him as a man and a poet is intellectually formidable. She can be both critical and understanding on the same page. There is a full field of Coleridge scholars at the moment, but in my view Molly was in there first, and is still the outstanding one.' From the Foreword by Melvyn Bragg.

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker track Marvell's negotiations among personalities and events; explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions, and speculate on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings -- what they call his 'imagined life'. Hirst and Zwicker draw the figure of an imagined life from the repeated traces Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and suggest how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination.
The book sheds new light on some of Marvell's most familiar poems -- 'Upon Appleton House', 'The Garden', ' To His Coy Mistress', and 'Horatian Ode' -- but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell's 'The unfortunate Lover', his least familiar and surely most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading, for the first time, of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' - writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen - than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual's role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a "great human meeting place, a spectacle," a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

Emily Dickinson may be the most widely read American poet but the story behind her work's publication in 1890 is barely known. After Emily recounts the extraordinary lives of Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham and the powerful literary legacy they shared. Mabel's complicated relationships with the Dickinsons-including her thirteen-year extramarital affair with Emily's brother, Austin-roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Julie Dobrow has unearthed hundreds of primary sources to tell this compelling story and reveal the surprising impact Mabel and Millicent had on the Emily Dickinson we know today.

John McGahern was the most admired Irish novelist of the past fifty years. His accessible fiction won him a wide readership throughout Ireland, but the accomplishment of his craft ensured that he also became known as a writer's writer. He set his novels in places he knew intimately-Dublin, London, and the West of Ireland, where he grew up-and became known for the intimacy and honesty of his mapping of home truths of Irish life. His first novel, The Barracks, was widely hailed as a classic on publication in 1963, and his later work, including Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun, and, indeed, Memoir, is built on the stylistic foundation of that novel. The first ten years of McGahern's career were the crucial, for it was during this time that he became an artist. This book explores a young man's discovery of literature. McGahern's youthful realization that books provide both intense pleasure and a spiritual lifeline towards a unique kind of knowledge matured in his twenties. Struggling to overcome desolating experiences in childhood, and abandoning conventional beliefs, he found his anchor in European literary classics. His discovery of how a powerful individual personality could be embedded in novels and stories inspired him. He became an impassioned reader of Proust, Tolstoy, and Flaubert as well as a select few local writers, the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the novelist Michael McLaverty, whose work more closely mirrored his own experience and aspirations. Denis Sampson recreates McGahern's personal and cultural circumstances in Dublin and London in the fifties and early sixties: his absorption of the lives and the work of classic writers; his shrewd observations of those he encountered; his definition of the kind of poetic writer he wished to become. He consider McGahern's first efforts as an apprentice novelist and weaves the inner story of the writing of The Barracks in 1960-62 into a narrative of his imaginative formation. This is an account of McGahern's triumphant emergence from what he called 'my years of training in the secret Dublin years'. In the decades that followed, whilst he experimented in styles and genres, the foundational aspects of his identity as a writer remained constant.

Homage to Catalonia remains one of the most famous accounts of the Spanish Civil War. With characteristic scrutiny, Orwell questions the actions and motives of all sides whilst retaining his firm beliefs in human courage and the need for radical social change.

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 Helen Graham, a leading historian on the Spanish Civil War.

When George Orwell arrived in Spain in 1936, he signed up to fight with the Republican army against Fascism. Homage to Catalonia is his bracing personal account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. From the front line he describes, with brutal honesty, the frustrations and inefficiencies of battle; he is caught up in vicious street fighting in Barcelona and must flee for his life when Republican factions turn on each other.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

** Chosen as a New Statesman, Financial Times, Observer and Sunday Times Book of the Year ** A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot's celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary. 'A rattling good story' Sunday Telegraph 'A work of art' Times Literary Supplement The Waste Land has been called the 'World's Greatest Poem'. It is said to describe the moral decay of a world after war, to find meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labelled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.

Edward Thomas is an important figure in the English literary canon, a major twentieth-century poet, he was also one of England's most experienced and respected Edwardian and Georgian critics, and an observer of the countryside second to none. Although he died at the age of only 39, his prose output was massive and encompassed a range of genres: biography, autobiography, essays, reviews, fiction, nature books, travel writings, and anthologies. While Thomas's stature as a poet is widely appreciated, his prose works have yet to be given their critical due - in large part because scholarly editions have hitherto been lacking. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition shows that Thomas's prose deserves to be much better known, by literary scholars but also the general reading public. This six-volume edition establishes him as one of the most important prose writers in English, who contributed remarkable ideas and representations of the self and community, the landscape and ecology, literature and history, the spiritual and artistic life. It is the definitive edition of Thomas's prose and a significant scholarly resource for the twenty-first century. The second volume contains Thomas's writings on England and Wales, and is mostly concerned with his response to the countryside. It covers the entirety of his writing career, showing the development of his identity and style. Works appear in chronological order within the volume, which begins with a comprehensive introduction, providing biographical details, an account of the circumstances of composition, historical contextualisation of the volume's themes and concerns, and an interpretation based on original research. Thomas's complex and brilliant prose, intricately woven using many quotations and allusions, is elucidated by a detailed headnote at the start of each work, and by extensive annotation.

Marylebone has been home to its fair share of rogues, villains and eccentrics, and their stories are told here. The authors also want to remind the reader that alongside the glamour of Society, there has also been hardship and squalor in the parish, as was graphically illustrated in Charles Booth's poverty maps of London in 1889. Over the past 10 years the Marylebone Journal has printed historical essays on the people, places, and events that have helped shape the character of the area. Some are commemorated with a blue plaque, but many are not. This is not a check-list of the grandees of Marylebone, though plenty appear in these pages. The essays have been grouped into themes of: history, politicians and warriors, culture and sport (from pop music and television to high art), love and marriage (stories from romance to acrimonious divorce), criminals, science and medicine, buildings and places, and the mad bad and dangerous to know - those whose stories don't fit a convenient box but are too good not to tell.

'It took two decades for me to go in search of the parts of myself I had left behind in the Caribbean. What ghosts were waiting for me there? There was a thick, black journal in my flat, stuffed with letters, postcards, handwritten notes and diary entries. For the first time in years, I opened it.' Twenty years after living there as a child, Alexis Keir returns to the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. He is keen to uncover lost memories and rediscover old connections. But he also carries with him the childhood scars of being separated from his parents and put into uncaring hands. Inspired by the embrace of his relatives in the Caribbean, Alexis begins to unravel the stories of others who left Saint Vincent, searching through diary pages and newspaper articles, shipping and hospital records and faded photographs. He uncovers tales of exploitation, endeavour and bravery of those who had to find a home far away from where they were born. A child born with vitiligo, torn from his mother's arms to be exhibited as a showground attraction in England; a woman who, in the century before the Windrush generation, became one of the earliest Black nurses to be recorded as working in a London hospital; a young boy who became a footman in a Yorkshire stately home. And Alexis's mother, a student nurse who arrives in 1960s London, ready to start a new life in a cold, grey country - and the man from her island whom she falls in love with. From the Caribbean to England, North America and New Zealand, from windswept islands to the rainy streets of London, and spanning generations of travellers from the 19th century to the present, Windward Family takes you inside the beating heart of a Black British family, separated by thousands of miles but united by love, loss and belonging. Read what everyone is saying about Windward Family: 'Being Black British is more than an identity, it is a journey into uncharted waters of personal history. Alexis Keir's deeply moving account will ring true for all of those navigating their own stories.' David Lammy 'Poignant... like reading about your own ancestors, who were once lost but now found and brought to life... a joy to read.' Anni Domingo, actor, director and author of Breaking the Maafa Chain 'Brilliant... Profound... written in lyrical cinematic prose. I reread many passages strictly for their beauty.' H. Nigel Thomas 'A beautiful, illuminating read. Full of heart and wisdom.' Irenosen Okojie 'Very powerful and gripping.' Goodreads reviewer 'I fell in love with this story.' Goodreads reviewer 'A labour of love, and every word is heartfelt.' Goodreads reviewer 'Moving... eye opening... A very special story by a talented author.' Goodreads reviewer

With his recent theatrical success, The Play What I Wrote, Braben shows that the audience for the spirit of the incomparable Eric and Ernie is just as alive today as it was in their glory years. Now, the key figure behind their success, scriptwriter Braben, has written his autobiography - with the inimitable, timeless humour, warmth and affection for Eric and Ernie of that wonderful bygone era which made their classic sketches so successful. From Liverpool to London and on to Snowdonia, Braben peppers his story with wonderful anecdotes about the original straight man and his amiable sidekick. The Book What I Wrote is as much a unique biography of the charismatic Eric and Ernie as it is an autiobiography of the man on whose gags their success was made.

Autobiographies is the first volume in Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition. It contains the autobiographical prose of one of the most respected British writers of the twentieth century, including the autobiographical story The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, the posthumously published 'autobiography' The Childhood of Edward Thomas, the essay 'How I Began', the previously unpublished 'Addenda to Autobiography', and a long section from 'Fiction' (also previously unpublished). In these works, all written between 1912 and 1914, Thomas provides a remarkable portrait of his childhood and teenage years in London, Wiltshire, and Wales. Writing this prose was a journey away from a troubled present back into earlier and happier experiences, but these unique autobiographies also have much in common with his other prose works. The complexity and brilliance of Thomas's autobiographical prose is discussed and revealed in a long introduction, by a detailed headnote at the start of each work, and by extensive annotation. Thomas's prose has never previously been given the scholarly attention that it receives here. Although Thomas's autobiographies are very accessible, and written with a longing for the simplicity of childhood, they are also intricately woven, using many quotations and allusions. The longest of the works, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, is both his simplest prose work and his most complex. Indeed, Autobiographies contains some of Thomas's finest prose, written in the two years, and in some cases merely a few months, before his decision to start writing the poetry for which he is most, and greatly, esteemed. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition will appeal to those who know and admire his prose, as well as those who have never encountered it before, and show that Thomas's prose, not least his autobiographical prose, deserves to be much better known.

'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES 'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN 'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller ______________ Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell's own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell's stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over - a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new. 'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell

A SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (AS CHOSEN BY AUTHORS) **LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE** 'Outstanding. I'll be recommending this all year.' SARAH BAKEWELL 'A beautiful and deeply moving book.' SALLY ROONEY 'I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.' Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925 Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently. Francesca Wade's spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own. 'Elegant, erudite and absorbing, Square Haunting is a startlingly original debut, and Francesca Wade is a writer to watch.' FRANCES WILSON 'A fascinating voyage through the lives of five remarkable women - moving and immersive.' EDMUND GORDON

The first and collection of Virginia Woolf's most inspirational quotes. 'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.' Over 100 words of wisdom from the inimitable Virginia Woolf on love, literature, feminism, food, work, ageing, authenticity, nature, truth, happiness and everything in between, carefully selected and curated from Woolf's timeless novels, essays and speeches. A celebration of one of the world's best loved writers and a true feminist icon, in a beautifully packaged, small-format gift book.

From 1893-1895 George Griffith was the most famous science fiction writer in England. His books entranced the readers of the 19th century with tales of Martians, submarines, immortality, rogue comets and even spaceships whizzing around the solar system. He invented the Countdown in 1897 and his son would become the co-inventor of the jet engine. Griffith's name became synonymous with high adventure and so in the Spring of 1894 he was recruited to follow in the mythical footsteps of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg. In just 65 days Griffith travelled through 24 time zones and established a new world record. Now for the first time in over 100 years his story can be retold along with a lengthy biography of his many literary achievements by noted Space writer and editor, Robert Godwin. It includes a special Introduction by John Griffith, grandson of George Griffith.

For generations, the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder have defined the American frontier and the pioneer experience for the public at large. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts presents three typescripts of Wilder's original Pioneer Girl manuscript in an examination of the process through which she and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed her autobiography into the much-loved Little House series. As the women polished the narrative from draft to draft, a picture emerges of the working relationship between the women, of the lives they lived, and of the literary works they created. Editor Nancy Tystad Koupal and other editors of the Pioneer Girl Project provide a meticulous study of the Wilder/Lane partnership as Wilder's autobiography undergoes revision, and the women redevelop and expand portions of it into Wilder's successful children's and young adult novels and into Lane's bestselling adult novels in the 1930s. The three revised texts of Pioneer Girl, set side by side, showcase the intertwined processes of writing and editing and the contributions of writer and editor. In background essays and annotations, Koupal and her team of editors provide historical context and explore the ways in which Wilder or Lane changed and reused the material. Wilder and Lane's partnership has been the subject of longstanding speculation, but Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts is the first work to explore the women's relationship by examining the evolution of surviving manuscripts. Showcasing differences in the texts and offering numerous additional documents and handwritten emendations, the editors create a rich resource for scholars to use in assessing the editorial and writing principles, choices, and reasoning that Lane employed to shape the manuscripts for publication. Readers can follow along as Wilder grows into a novelist that "no depression could stop." The New York Times best seller, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014), edited by Pamela Smith Hill, gave the general reader easy access to Wilder's original account for the first time, but that book only scratched the surface of available textual and archival materials. Ultimately, the editors of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts employ the rich resource of letters between Wilder and her publisher and between Wilder and Lane, along with rough drafts and false starts of the Little House books, to inform scholars and readers about the original manuscript's metamorphosis into novels and about the intriguing editorial relationship between Wilder and Lane. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts deepens our understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the process through which she would ultimately become an icon of young adult literature.

Maurice Bowra was, according to one's point of view, either the most distinguished or the most notorious Oxford don of the early twentieth century. Classicist, poet, wit, raconteur extraordinary, and Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, he met nearly everyone of consequence in the worlds of literature and politics and had stories to tell about them all, from Jean Cocteau to Virginia Woolf, from Adolf Hitler to the Kennedys, from Isaiah Berlin to Charlie Chaplin. By force of personality and intellectual range, he influenced the thinking of almost everyone with whom he came into contact. Above all, brought up in Edwardian England, he was able to chart the ways in which the values of his youth were tested by new democratic ideas. His experiences allowed him to develop and employ theories of education that were startling, and which would mould the thinking of a generation of English intellectuals. Based upon a wide range of interviews and previously unpublished manuscript material, this is the first ever biography of Bowra, and covers every aspect of his life, from soldier on the Western Front to Oxford classicist, from celebrated wit to frustrated poet manque.

Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. Capper brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the major movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and he reveals how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini and many others.

The incredible story behind the founder of Noble & Noble and cofounder of Barnes & Noble comes to life in this compelling biography of G. Clifford Noble. From his humble beginnings as a poor country boy to the co-owner of what would someday become the most prestigious book store chain in the country, The Noble Legacy celebrates the life of a true American icon. Already a budding entrepreneur at age twelve, Noble grew up in Massachusetts in the aftermath of the Civil War. Dedicated to his religious faith and driven to succeed, he graduated from Harvard with distinction and moved to New York City in the fall of 1886. His first job as a clerk at a small wholesale and retail bookstore ignited his passion for bookselling. Noble's amazing business sense propelled him to continued success, culminating in the establishment of two premier book companies, Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble. Noble's granddaughter, Betty Noble Turner, pens a touching tribute to her grandfather and artfully captures his legacy. She also offers a historical dissertation on the origin and challenges of Noble's two companies, as well as a loving life story about the man himself.

Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love (sacred and profane) and his life in Grub Street - as a prolific writer. Before he came to London, as one of the "Best of Young British" novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. N. Wilson. We meet his father, the Managing Director of Wedgwood, the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school, and the dons of Oxford - one of whom, at the age of just 20, he married, Katherine Duncan-Jones, the renowned Shakespearean scholar. The book begins with his heart-torn present-day visits to Katherine, now for decades his ex-wife, who has slithered into the torments of dementia. At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self - whether he is flirting with unsuitable lovers or with the idea of the priesthood. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book. We follow his unsuccessful attempts to become an academic, his aspirations to be a Man of Letters, and his eventual encounters with the famous, including some memorable meetings with royalty. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson's early comic fiction. But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most.