The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West. Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs. Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland to Oxford (where she met Yeats and Eliot), through her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, to her friendships with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Glendinning lifts the veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her novels. 'One of the best critical biographies to have come my way for some time... A beautifully composed portrait.' Sunday Telegraph 'It reads like a good novel.' Irish Times

From Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography. 'It's Succession in tailcoats and spats ... This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings' Sunday Times Who was John Lewis? What story lies behind the retail empire that bears his name? Behind the glass windows and displays of soft furnishing, this book reveals the family that founded the shops in all their eccentricities, and whose relationships became blighted by conflicts of epic proportions as their wealth bloomed. Born into poverty, John Lewis was orphaned at the age of seven when his father died in a Somerset workhouse. Dreaming of a better life, the young man travelled to London at the start of what would become a retail revolution. From early years as a draper's apprentice, we see how Lewis's first pokey little business opened on Oxford Street in 1864, and expanded as an emerging middle class embraced the department stores as a recreational experience. Prize-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning has had full access to the company and family archives to write this eye-opening story. She captures the toxic relationships that unfolded between Lewis and his two sons, Spedan and Oswald, as they collided over the future of their retail empire - their worst moments including emotional blackmail, face-slapping and a kidnapping - and much litigation between father and both sons. Yet the family never broke up and Spedan's vision of a Partnership model to act as an ethical corrective and foster a community of happier, more productive workers was eventually realised and survives to this day. With riveting personal detail, this brilliant group biography captures a rags-to-riches story and a tempestuous family saga, all unfolding against the dramatic social and political worlds of nineteenth-century London. The book concludes with an assessment of the position John Lewis holds in British sensibilities, and whether John Lewis and institutions like it have a place in our future.

By the time of his death, Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the founder of Singapore and Governor of Java, having left school in his early teens to become a clerk for the British East India Company. Charismatic and daring, Raffles forged an extraordinary path for himself in South East Asia - refusing to be satisfied with the trading posts available to the British, he defied Dutch governors and wrangled with warring local rulers to establish what is now a world city.

An ardent linguist and zoologist, Raffles spoke fluent Malay and found time to write The History of Java, as well as naming several species of flora and fauna he discovered on his travels. He founded London Zoo and promoted the study of Malay alongside European languages in Southeast Asia.

Raffles remains a controversial figure - a utopian imperialist, disobedient employee and knight of the realm who died deeply in debt, predeceased by all but one of his children. He built racial segregation into his urban planning, but was also a staunch abolitionist. Renowned biographer Victoria Glendinning charts Raffles' prodigious rise in this new edition, specially updated for the bicentenary of the foundation of Singapore in 1819. His life was short, complicated and shot through with tragedy, but Raffles' fame lives on.

From Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography. 'It's Succession in tailcoats and spats ... This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings' Sunday Times Who was John Lewis? What story lies behind the retail empire that bears his name? Behind the glass windows and displays of soft furnishing, this book reveals the family that founded the shops in all their eccentricities, and whose relationships became blighted by conflicts of epic proportions as their wealth bloomed. Born into poverty, John Lewis was orphaned at the age of seven when his father died in a Somerset workhouse. Dreaming of a better life, the young man travelled to London at the start of what would become a retail revolution. From early years as a draper's apprentice, we see how Lewis's first pokey little business opened on Oxford Street in 1864, and expanded as an emerging middle class embraced the department stores as a recreational experience. Prize-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning has had full access to the company and family archives to write this eye-opening story. She captures the toxic relationships that unfolded between Lewis and his two sons, Spedan and Oswald, as they collided over the future of their retail empire - their worst moments including emotional blackmail, face-slapping and a kidnapping - and much litigation between father and both sons. Yet the family never broke up and Spedan's vision of a Partnership model to act as an ethical corrective and foster a community of happier, more productive workers was eventually realised and survives to this day. With riveting personal detail, this brilliant group biography captures a rags-to-riches story and a tempestuous family saga, all unfolding against the dramatic social and political worlds of nineteenth-century London. The book concludes with an assessment of the position John Lewis holds in British sensibilities, and whether John Lewis and institutions like it have a place in our future.

'Historical fiction at its finest.' @MargaretAtwood It is 1535 and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West-country butcher, has been banished, leaving her family home in disgrace to live out the rest of her life cloistered behind the walls of Shaftesbury Abbey. While Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of the sisterhood, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Head of the Church of England. Religious houses are being formally subjugated, monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. Cast out with her sisters, Agnes is at last free to be the master of her own fate. But freedom comes at a price as she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive - by any means necessary...

Isabelle is beautiful, immensely rich and a widow at the age of twenty-six. In 1928 she leaves America for Cannes and Paris in search of high society - and love. For though outwardly she has everything women dream of, inside she craves the peace of a lasting marriage. To find the kind of love she needs Isabelle must choose between three men: her violent, fascinating lover, the aristocrat Andre de Verviers; a reserved plantation owner from the Deep South, Laurence Vernon; and the eccentric millionaire Marc Sellafranque... First published in 1936, this is Rebecca West's most popular work of fiction: at once a masterful portrayal of the brilliance and decadence of high society in the 1920s, and a poignant and compassionate portrait of one woman's life and loves.

The family at the 'big house' is in an equivocal position. Interest and tradition should make them support the British but affection ties them to the now resistant people of the surrounding country. Meanwhile, tennis parties and dances are still held, against a background of ambushes. Young officers dance and flirt, or, armed, they patrol the countryside. Faint vibrations of trouble that she cannot understand reach the young girl Lois, who at the same time takes nothing for granted: she is a child of the transition period. Time is not standing still, and no one really believes that it is. Fate is moving in the direction of this apparently immune and remote place. The young are set to be desolating free, the old desolated, by a violent act.

A new edition of Leonard Woolf's satirical second novel, which offers an intriguing group portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury Group The Wise Virgins (1914), Leonard Woolf's second novel, was published two years after the author's marriage to Virginia Stephen-and begun during their honeymoon. The autobiographical elements of the book are well documented. Its publication caused acute distress to Woolf's family. Leonard's sister, Bella, urged him to bury the novel, while his mother was shocked and mortified by unflattering portraits of herself and her neighbors. Two weeks after reading the novel, Virginia Woolf suffered the worst of her many breakdowns. As aroman a clef the novel holds considerable interest for its picture of Leonard and Virginia's courtship, as well as its sketches of Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell. (Virginia would later retell the story, from a much different perspective, in Night and Day.) But the novel offers the contemporary reader other rewards. It remains a witty, engaging satire about English society just before World War I and its conventions and prejudices. In Harry Davis, Woolf created a memorable Jewish antihero who rails against society's conventions but tragically finds himself unable to escape them. Award-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning contributes a foreword to this new paperback edition.

The first ever biography of the publisher, writer, activist, and husband at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
Many people today know Leonard Woolf through the surname of his wife, Virginia, or his role in supporting her through her mental illness, depicted in films like The Hours . Some critics see him as his wife ' s oppressor. In Victoria Glendinning ' s biography, for the first time we see the whole man.
As well as being a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Leonard was a formidable figure in his own right, first as an innovative civil administrator in Ceylon, then as a writer, leading light of the Fabian society, and publisher of T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Katherine Mansfield, and of course Virginia Woolf.
Victoria Glendinning brings careful research and new material to bear on every aspect of Woolf ' s life, painting an engrossing portrait of a man who was ahead of his time, an unapologetic socialist and passionate anti-racist. Her engaging biography brings new perspective to our understanding of the man, his work, and the Bloomsbury circle and its achievements.

From the Hardcover edition.

In this richly detailed biography, Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist whose literary achievements were equaled only by her unbounded gift for living.
Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen's Court, to Oxford where she met Yeats and Eliot, to her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, this penetrating biography lifts the thin veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her shimmering novels. We see her at elegant parties, where such friends as Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Evelyn Waugh fell under her spell; in post-war Vienna with Graham Greene; and in war-torn London, where she fell in love with a younger man who was unprepared for life at the pitch she lived it. We see her bound through several affairs to a comfortable marriage, living " life with the lid on." The world of Elizabeth Bowen was akin to that of her novels: no one behaved shockingly, yet the passions that stirred within made her a master of the ultimate suspense of human relationships- the life of the heart.

'Glendinning succeeds, as no biographer has done before, in bringing him to life on the page-Here, at last, is an Anthony Trollope whom one can know as a man-The effect is startlingly impressive.' Jonathan Raban, Independent on Sunday'Enormously enjoyable' John Mortimer, Books of the Year, Sunday Times
'Full of fascinating knowledge about the Victorian age in England-A great story superbly told.' Augustine Martin, Irish Times'As compelling readable as any of Anthony's own novels.' Ruth Rendell, Sunday Express'Altogether excellent' Anita Brookner, Spectator
'The finest of several recent lives of Trollope-smoothly written, splendidly readable.' Julian Symons, Books of the Year, Sunday Times'I came to this biography of Trollope with unreasonably high expectations. They were amply fulfilled
-A work as readable, richly shifting and well-shaped as a good novel-compendiously well-informed.' Caroline Moore, The Times'A brilliant and subtle interweaving of the man and the work; wonderful.' Joanna Trollope, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph

Cousin Rosamund unfolds the final chapters of the saga that began with The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West's acknowleged masterpiece, and continued with This Real Night. As the glitter of the 1920s gives way to the Depression, Rose and Mary find themselves feted and successful pianists. But their happiness is diminished by their cousin's unfathomable marriage to a man they perceive as grotesque. Lacking her cousin Rosamund's intuitive understanding, Rose looks to the surrogate wisdom of Mr Morpurgo, while quiet days with Aunt Lily and the Darcys at their pub on the Thames offer respite from the tensions of foreign concert tours. With approaching middle age Rose gains in perspective. Yet the most exciting development still awaits her: the discovery of and delight in her own sexuality...