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.

Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window – their circling, animated calls – and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the year 2020, and as the pandemic takes hold she locks down with her partner, her two children, and that most mercurial of writers. Proceeding month by month through the year, Lara sets out to reassess D. H. Lawrence; to use him as a guide to life; to find companionship; to help her make sense of this new, off-kilter world. Tracing the arc of Lawrence’s life and delving deep into his writings, she is exposed to his rage, his passion, his tumultuous vitality. And as she watches the season change alongside D.H. Lawrence, Lara finds the rhythms of her own life changing in new and unexpected ways. A dazzling blend of literary criticism, biography and memoir, Look! We Have Come Through! is a spellbinding excavation of an author, and a compelling manifesto for living bravely.

Modernism on Sea brings together writing by some of today's most exciting seaside critics, curators, filmmakers and scholars, and takes the reader on a journey around the coast of Britain to explore the rich artistic and cultural heritage that can be found there, from St Ives to Scarborough. The authors consider avant-garde art, architecture, film, literature and music, from the early twentieth century to the present, setting the arrival of modernism against the background of seaside tradition. From the cheeky postcards marvelled at by George Orwell to austere modernist buildings such as the De La Warr Pavilion; from the Camden Town Group's sojourn in Brighton to John Piper's 'Nautical Style'; from Paul Nash's surrealist benches on the promenade in Swanage to the influence of bunting and deckchairs on the Festival of Britain - Modernism on Sea is a sweeping tour de force which pays tribute to the role of the seaside in shaping British modernism.

War affects life writing and lives affect war writing. The traditional forms of life writing - memoir, biography, letters, diaries - buckle under the strain of war. War writing has fewer traditional forms but exists at a similar extreme. The eight chapters in this book, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars in the field, illuminate the creative innovations, improvisations, and implosions which happen when the demands of writing war and writing lives collide. Central to all is the question of authenticity: how can wars and lives be known and who can speak of them with authority? This volume has a generous chronological and generic range, beginning in the early 1800s and stretching to twenty-first-century texts, and covering letters, diaries, fiction, 'fakeries', poetry, biography, testimony, songs, objects, and digital media. The mix of authors is similarly varied: Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bowen rub shoulders with Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (a contemporary Palestinian poet), Farah Baker (a Gazan teenager) and the writers behind the pen names Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajane. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes and bombs heralded gruelling nights of sleeplessness, fear and loss. But for Graham Greene and some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs and surreal beauty. At the height of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one 'like a love-charm'. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and infidelities begun. The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters and ARP wardens, these were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War and their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves letters, diaries and fiction with official civil defence records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London and post-war Vienna and Berlin. She reveals the haunting, ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a war-torn world.

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places. W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932 Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in 1995. In choosing from these voluminous journals for the new edition, the editors have tried to provide a picture of the various lives Spender brought together in autobiographical form. The earlier 1985 edition of the Journals was overseen by the author, and it privileged his thoughts about poetry - his own and other people's. The new edition includes the final ten years of Spender's life and provides access to the more intimate thoughts and feelings of the private man, but equally documents his life as a public intellectual who played a part in shaping the European literary and intellectual culture of his age. As we look back on the dramatic events of the twentieth century, we find that Spender was involved in many of them: the reconstruction of Germany and the construction of Europe (as Unesco's first Literary Councillor), the development of the cultural Cold War (as editor of Encounter), the founding of Israel, the anti-Vietnam movement in America. The Journals provide a personal version of sixty turbulent years of the twentieth century, hovering between diary, autobiography and history.

War affects life writing and lives affect war writing. The traditional forms of life writing - memoir, biography, letters, diaries - buckle under the strain of war. War writing has fewer traditional forms but exists at a similar extreme. The eight chapters in this book, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars in the field, illuminate the creative innovations, improvisations, and implosions which happen when the demands of writing war and writing lives collide. Central to all is the question of authenticity: how can wars and lives be known and who can speak of them with authority? This volume has a generous chronological and generic range, beginning in the early 1800s and stretching to twenty-first-century texts, and covering letters, diaries, fiction, 'fakeries', poetry, biography, testimony, songs, objects, and digital media. The mix of authors is similarly varied: Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bowen rub shoulders with Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (a contemporary Palestinian poet), Farah Baker (a Gazan teenager) and the writers behind the pen names Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajane. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

'A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women' Rachel Cusk The five of them - Stella, Priss, Kay, Helena and Polly - met at university, their lives full of lazy afternoons and late nights. Friendship seemed simple and there was such pleasure in the endless talk and in just living alongside each other. Now the women are turning forty and they're finding that a shared past can sometimes be a burden. They're all struggling to navigate the ways in which their lives have differed from the plans they made themselves and the hopes they had for each other. In the past, solidarity came easily, but now they compare lovers, husbands, jobs, children and sofas, asking how the choices they've made or failed to make hold up. As marriages end and secrets emerge, they wonder whether these people, the ones who know so much about them, are really the ones they can confide in.

This book is both a celebration of the life and career of the eminent literary scholar, critic, and journalist John Sutherland and an extension of Sutherland's work in various fields, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, the publishing industry, and its impact upon creativity and literary puzzles. With contributions from over twenty-five distinguished critics, literary journalists and scholars, this book goes beyond merely describing Sutherland's work. The essayists pay homage to Sutherland while also staking their own critical/scholarly claims. From investigating the publishing dimension, Victorians major and minor, the complexities of Dickens and George Eliot, the "archeology" of Pride and Prejudice to examining the implications of Shakespearean souvenirs, literary puzzles, and Non-Victorians, the essays offer fresh dimensions to Sutherland's rich career as a professor, critic, and journalist.

'A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women' Rachel Cusk Lara Feigel's first novel, The Group, is a fiercely intelligent, revealing novel about a group of female friends turning forty. Who has children and who doesn't? Whose marriages are working, whose aren't, and who has embarked on completely different models of sexuality and relationships? Who has managed to fulfil their promise, whose life has foundered and what do they think about it, either way? The Group is an engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship, and a thrillingly intimate and acute take on female character in an age that may or may not have been changed by feminism in its different strands.

'A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir . Highly enjoyable' Sunday Times

How might we live more freely, and will we be happier or lonelier if we do? Rereading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, Lara Feigel discovered that Doris Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, writer and mother in a way that no other novelist had done. Veering between admiration and fury at the choices Lessing made, Feigel conducts a dazzling investigation into the joys and costs of sexual, psychological, intellectual and political freedom. The result is this genre-defying book: at once a meditation on life and literature and a daring act of self-exposure.