One of the twentieth century's most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West.

She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in "The Good Earth," an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China's future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China's building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.
Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl's life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld."
Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in "The Good Earth. "It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that "The Good Earth "would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang's "Wild Swans "would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either.
Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people-- "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

Brilliantly compiled and presented by the celebrated biographer, Hilary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book has become a classic in the history of English cooking, and an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the fabric of everyday Elizabethan life.

'Hilary Spurling has done brilliantly ... Being both a scholar and a cook seems to be a rare combination than one might have expected.' Jane Grigson

'Few cookery books are as important or as fascinating as this ... (Hilary Spurling's) scholarly and practical skills combined make the book much more than an antiquarian curiosity. It is a cookery book to use.' Victoria Glendinning, "The Times"

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""'Hilary Spurling's research into Lady Fettiplace's family and background is stunning. She and her household do really come to life ... Hilary Spurling's pinpointing of her precise social standing and that of her intimates and acquaintances, of the kind of lives they led, consequently the kind of food they ate, the way it was prepared, preserved and so on, are all subjects of the greatest interest.' Elizabeth David

'Inspired, innovative, remarkable' Independent 'Spurling has done better than anyone else at uncovering intimate information about Matisse' Guardian The abridged, one-volume edition of Hilary Spurling's critically acclaimed biography of Henri Matisse, one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the twentieth century Henri Matisse was one of the most important and beloved artists of the twentieth century, rivalled only by his friend and competitor Pablo Picasso. Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master were together heralded as the definitive biography of the artist, and Matisse the Master went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2005. This essential abridged edition of the Life reveals the origins of Matisse's astonishing talent, provides a unique insight into his life and work, and, by documenting the difficult path he took alone, clearly places him at the front rank of those who made art modern.

"Praising . The portrait of George Orwell's second wife drawn by his biographers is a travesty. Determined to set the record straight, her friend Hilary Spurling, herself an acclaimed biographer, reveals the whole story of Sonia Orwell's sad and splendid life.Beautiful, intelligent, and idealistic, but also, as she grew older, belligerent and intimidating, Sonia was the model for Julia, heroine of Orwell's . Her friends and admirers included W.H. Auden, Lucian Freud, and Frances Bacon. She was Cyril Connolly's indispensable assistant on the influential literary magazine Horizon during the 1940s and in the '60s she co-edited the groundbreaking four-volume collection of Orwell's nonfiction writings. Nonetheless, she has most frequently been depicted as mean and mercenary. Spurling portrays the real Sonia Orwell in all her generous, spirited, ferocious, and self-doubting complexity.

This is the first complete guide to Anthony Powell's classic sequence of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time. Its main item is a Who's Who of characters, fiction and factual, from Lord Aberavon to Hitler ('I like the little man they've got in Germany now': Uncle Giles), Marx ('Summoned by planchette and leaves a message for Quiggin after Sunday luncheon at the Templars'), Stalin ('Mrs Widmerpool's hero and prospective second husband') and that most memorable character of twentieth-century fiction, Kenneth Widmerpool himself. Three further indexes, with full page references and extensive quotations, cover respectively all the books, paintings and places visited or mentioned, and a synopsis of events clarifies trickier points of chronology. Readable and comprehensive, Hilary Spurling's handbook is as fascinating to the general reader as it is invaluable to the scholar.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 in The Sunday Times, Spectator, Mail on Sunday, Observer and Financial Times 'A landmark biography' The Times, Books of the Year 'One of our generation's greatest biographers' London Review of Books 'Witty, spirited, richly crowded with incident and character - a joy to read' Prospect From the author of the prize-winning Matisse The Master comes an essential biography of one of 20th century Britain's greatest literary minds Anthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an epic twelve spectacular volume cyle of novels about twentieth century British society. This comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing Britain through war and peace in all its eccentricity. And it was inspired by the author's own life immersed in rich social intrigue - debutante balls, penniless muses, publisher feuds, summers on the French Riviera, weekend parties at country houses, and friendships with everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene to VS Naipaul... Hilary Spurling brings all this back to vivid life, investigating the friends, relations, lovers and acquaintances, fools and savants who surrounded Anthony Powell, and who he immortalised in his magnificent literary legacy. * Discover Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, available in paperback and e-book from Arrow.