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The close and abiding friendship of Robert Harling and Ian Fleming was forged during the Second World War, when Harling was Fleming’s deputy in the commando unit dubbed ‘Fleming’s Secret Navy’. Described by Fiona MacCarthy in her foreword as ‘a master of obfuscation’, Harling fictionalized his own life and inspired characters – even elements of 007 – in Fleming’s fiction. This memoir of his friend provides an entertaining portrait of the creator of James Bond, but also a revealing self-portrait of Harling.

Slightly off-mint.

The adventures of ex-soldier Jack Reacher have driven 25 novels, popular films starring Tom Cruise, and sold a hundred million copies, but their creator is more elusive. Through conversations with Lee Child – real name Jim Grant – his family, friends and teachers, this biography records the life of a Birmingham boy with a passion for reading, whose fascination with America led to a career as a TV executive in New York and Hollywood before he turned to writing.

Kafka’s last wish was to have all his manuscripts destroyed – instead, his friend Max Brod dedicated himself to editing and posthumously publishing the work. The story of Brod’s work is recounted here, including a contested trial for ownership between the courts of Israel and Palestine as both countries vied to claim Kafka’s legacy. Slightly off-mint.

When Lord William Russell was killed in 1840, his murderer claimed that he was inspired by William Harrison Ainsworth's novel about the notorious thief Jack Sheppard, causing a public sensation. Recreating the atmosphere of Victorian London, this volume explores how the leading writers of the day were drawn into the debate about the literary glorification of crime. American-cut pages.

Although he claimed to dash them off, the letters of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor are often long, vividly written and rich in observation of the people and places he encountered. This second selection, written to his wife Joan, to Deborah Mitford, to his fellow writers Cyril Connolly and Freya Stark and many others date from the 1930s to shortly before his death, aged 96, in 2011.

This unconventional biography runs through Evelyn Waugh’s life to show how painful and embarrassing events fed into his novels, notably his love for the woman who shared his Christian name: Evelyn Gardner, or ‘She-Evelyn’. In prose that echoes its subject’s irreverent wit, Duncan McLaren brings in his own experiences, from his teenage obsession with Waugh to his researches for the book.

While tracing Graham Greene’s life from his difficult early years to an adulthood troubled by mental illness, this biography focuses on his extensive travelling and involvement with wars across the world. Using hundreds of letters that were only recently discovered, and the memoirs of those who were close to him, Richard Greene (no relation) also explores the novelist’s engagement with the politics of the locations he visited and his association with MI6.

The extent of Gaiman’s creativity is revealed in this comprehensive volume, which features examples of final artwork as well as previously unpublished manuscript excerpts, drawings and photographs from his personal archive. For each of his major projects, including American Gods, The Sandman and Good Omens, it brings together interview comments gathered over the course of his career and biographical details to offer insight into his sources of inspiration and working methods. Off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower or upper trimmed edge.

In this award-winning biography AN Wilson frames Dickens’s life as a series of mysteries in order to reflect his complex and seemingly contradictory character. Exploring key aspects, from his childhood poverty and failed marriage to his charitable work and love of public readings, the book assesses their influence on his writing and how they enabled him to create characters who were instantly appealing and continue to resonate.

The Scottish journalist Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark (1918–2006) when he interviewed her in Arezzo, near her home in Tuscany, in 1990. In this memoir, he recounts his time spent with the novelist and her companion Penny, describing their parties, travels and idiosyncratic household arrangements. While offering an affectionate portrait of a witty, vivacious and intelligent woman, he does not shy away from controversy, particularly her bitter estrangement from her son. Slightly off-mint.

Roald Dahl’s hugely popular stories for both children and adults are rooted in his remarkable, often troubled life. This biography follows him from his childhood in Norway and Wales to the RAF and the Secret Service. It explores his two marriages, and confronts the contradictions of a man who could be a bully and a bigot one moment – embittered by illness and tragedy – but charming and generous the next.

Just as her best-selling tales of jolly childhood adventures often contained racist and xenophobic overtones, Enid Blyton’s carefully cultivated image of doting wife and mother belied her real nature. Revealing her to be a woman of contradictions, Nadia Cohen explores the author's darker side, uncovering the extramarital affairs and callously indifferent attitude towards her daughters that characterized her private life.

Elizabeth Branwell, who became a second mother to the Brontë children after the death of her sister Maria, was portrayed as a stern aunt in Mrs Gaskell’s life of Charlotte. This first biography reveals a kind-hearted woman who left her native Cornwall to care for the siblings, whose legacy enabled the publication of her nieces’ books, and who struggled to save her nephew Branwell from drug and alcohol addiction.

Byron’s lover Caroline Lamb described him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, and she was not the only woman to discover his dark side. This book explores his relationships with women, including his long-suffering mother Catherine and his wife Annabella Milbanke, who endured both his violent abuse and the knowledge of his incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh.

As the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, John W Campbell published and brought to prominence a group of writers who transformed the genre in the 1940s and 1950s. This book explores his troubled childhood and formative influences, his own writing, and his often fraught relationships with Asimov, Heinlein and Hubbard – the controversial founder of the Church of Scientology.

The award-winning biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons uncovers the lesser-known details of the life of Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), exploring how her experiences influenced the vivid characters she created. Using letter extracts and a variety of primary sources, she reveals her to be a woman of contradictions, whose avant-garde literary output and fervent social activism contrasted with her tolerance of her husband's philandering and misogyny and her own avowed opposition to female suffrage.

Ernest Hemingway’s life as a war correspondent, big-game hunter and womaniser is well known, as is his descent into depression and alcoholism. Based on previously unpublished letters, this new biography reveals a more disturbing picture: a man who was not merely a serial liar but incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy, using his fiction to denigrate former friends and rivals and to reinvent himself in a heroic light.

For 50 years, the novelist Patrick O’Brian lived with his wife Mary Tolstoy in southern France, writing his best-selling Aubrey-Maturin series of naval adventures. Based on personal experience as well as notebooks, letters and photographs, his stepson recreates that period and addresses the revelations about O’Brian’s true identity, including a previously abandoned family, that troubled the reclusive author’s last years.

The period between June 1797 and September 1798, when Coleridge was with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy at their house in the Quantocks, was possibly ‘the most famous moment in the history of English poetry’. To study that year, Nicholson walked in the footsteps of the poets, exploring their natural, social and personal environments, attempting to understand the physical experience that gave rise to works such as The Ancient Mariner and Lyrical Ballads. With woodcuts and paintings by Tom Hammick.

DJ Taylor, the literary critic and award-winning biographer of George Orwell, investigates the origins of Nineteen Eight-Four, showing how incidents and obsessions in the author’s early life, including the Spanish Civil War and the early Cold War years, shaped elements of the novel and particularly its view of totalitarianism. Taylor then traces the creation of the novel on the island of Jura, linking the writing to Orwell’s life and examining the lasting impact of his dystopian vision.

From Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer to authors such as Murakami and Arundhati Roy writing today, this literary compendium presents succinct biographical articles, notes on key books, quotations, portraits and other illustrations for over 100 novelists, poets and playwrights. The book is international in scope, with writers from places as far-flung as China and Argentina, and arranged in six chronological sections, each one ending with a ‘Directory’ giving briefer profiles of a further selection of authors.

First published in 1896, Housman’s A Shropshire Lad has never been out of print. This book explores both the life of the poet and that of the poems, which are reproduced in full. In addition to a biography of the shy, homosexual don, it offers a cultural history of a work that was carried into the trenches by soldiers in the First World War, and whose nostalgic Englishness still resonates today.

Charles Scott Moncrieff (1889–1930) is best known as the inspired translator of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Written with access to his personal archive, this biography reveals Scott Moncrieff as a man of contradictions: the poetic interpreter of Proust was also a much-decorated soldier who was seriously injured in France in 1916; a convert to Catholicism, he was also a homosexual; and this sociable, well-known man of letters led a parallel life as a spy in fascist Italy.

Looking at the social and political context of Austen’s work, this analysis shows how she was able to use her stories to comment on serious contemporary subjects, such as feminism, slavery, the treatment of the poor and the power of the Church. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Kieron O’Hara’s introduction to the life and thought of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), provides a guide to the key themes of works including Brave New World and The Doors of Perception and to the revolutionary intellectual and political contexts in which Huxley worked. 513217 After examining the context and motivations for Pope Urban II’s appeal for holy war in 1095, Andrew Jotischky recounts the conquests and reversals of the Crusades through 200 years, describes life in the Crusader States and, finally, discusses later interpretations of ‘crusading’.

For years before his death in 2012, Eric Hobsbawm was the best-known and most widely read historian in the world, a public intellectual and an influential spokesman for the Left, in Britain and abroad. In this biography, Evans quotes from Hobsbawm’s own writings across many genres, including autobiography, to trace ‘a life in history’, from the young communist in the Weimar Republic to an active old age, still committed to the idea of Communism and still writing in his tenth decade.

Arthur Conan Doyle shared his fictional detective’s desire to use deduction to bring justice to an unjust world. This book traces his fascination with crime back to the case of his French teacher, who was later hanged for murdering his wife, and tells how Doyle brought his deductive powers to bear on behalf of George Edalji, an Indian doctor convicted for mutilating livestock, and the alleged murderer Oscar Slater.

When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study In Scarlet in 1887 he couldn’t have known how enduringly famous Sherlock Holmes would become. Mattias Boström sets out to tell the story of the men and women who created an icon, bringing a scholar’s eye to the tale of the detective’s genesis, the stories’ initial wave of popularity and Holmes’s transformation into a screen role that is still being reinvented today.

This illustrated biography tells the story of Hemingway’s life through the objects he handled and kept, and features more than 400 photographs, letters, travel documents, train tickets, press cuttings and book jackets. Edited and introduced by the manager of the Hemingway estate, it includes a foreword and afterword by the writer’s son and grandson.

Starting with the puzzles surrounding his birth in Dublin in 1667, this highly regarded biography re-examines the evidence for Jonathan Swift’s life, gives new accounts of many aspects of the writer’s personal relationships, and shows how Swift created a deliberately misleading version of his own public life.

'Anger is not about,’ wrote John Osborne in his final play. ‘It is mourning the unknown.’ In the 1950s and 1960s Osborne shocked and delighted British theatregoers, reflecting the unease of a changing nation, but by the 1980s he was out of step with his times. Drawing on interviews with friends and colleagues, this biography explores the rage at his provincial upbringing that fuelled his creativity, and the struggles with alcohol and debt that undermined it.

A worldwide sensation following its publication in 1859, Smiles’ Self-Help still influences our thinking about ‘the search for happiness’ in everyday life. This first biography of the man behind a modern phenomenon draws on his many other writings to trace how his ideas developed throughout his long life. It provides insights into the Victorians’ responses to their fast-changing world but also highlights the relevance of Smiles’ perspectives to today’s pressing questions about progress and freedom.

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was one of the 20th century's greatest writers, the poet of The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Crow, but also a children's storyteller, translator, critic, letter writer and the husband of Sylvia Plath. In this biography, Bates draws on the complete archive of writings that Hughes left for posterity, exploring the mental landscape it reveals to give the full story of the poet's life as it was lived, remembered and shaped in his art.

A series of everyday objects preserved at the Brontë parsonage in Haworth provides the entry-point for this exploration of the sisters’ lives and writing. The tiny notebooks in which they inscribed their juvenile literary efforts; their sewing box; the walking sticks they used when striding the moors; and Charlotte’s portable desk, her passionate letters to her married lover, and the bracelet containing locks of Emily’s and Anne’s hair all bear the imprint of their personalities and imaginations. Off-mint.

‘Edward Garnett,’ wrote EM Forster, ‘occupies a unique position in the literary history of our age.’ Confidant and critic of DH Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and John Galsworthy, Garnett was both feared and admired. This biography explores his often stormy relations with the writers he championed; his wife Constance, the translator who introduced Tolstoy to English readers; and his son David, writer and key member of the Bloomsbury Group.

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) has been called the Last of the Romantics. Obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, he ran away from school to pursue the poets, and moved into Dove Cottage when he was 24. This acclaimed biography follows the journalist’s wanderings through Soho, Ireland and the Lake District, exploring his fascination with the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, and the opium addiction that gave rise to his most famous work.

The author of Gulliver’s Travels was a man of complex character – a libertarian struggling with conservative beliefs, a church minister with complicated personal relationships, and a satirist who scorned the world yet sought to improve it. This biography follows his flight from war-torn Ireland in 1688 to the splendour and squalor of London, examining his shifting political allegiances and complicated love life to identify the roots of the ‘savage indignation’ that drove him.

For years after Oscar Wilde’s death his two closest friends and former lovers, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross, fought for control of his manuscripts, and reputation, and argued over who was to blame for his downfall. Drawing on previously unpublished information, Oscar’s Ghost uncovers a bitter feud that involved stalking, blackmail, lawsuits, witness tampering and prison, and influenced the way we perceive Wilde to this day.

Letters written as editor of the school magazine, love letters, begging letters, letters to literary editors, fellow poets and friends: the collected letters of Dylan Thomas trace his life from the age of 16 to shortly before his death in New York in 1953, at the age of 39. Outspoken, and often indiscreet, they form the poet’s own narrative, telling of his love of Caitlin, his opinions on poets and poetry, and a life famously marred by drink and debt. Second edition. The two titles included in this set are: Dylan Thomas The Collected Letters Volume I: 1931–1939 (Read more...)Dylan Thomas The Collected Letters Volumes II: 1939–1953 (Read more...)

The most widely read British poet of the 20th century, Philip Larkin was also a gifted amateur photographer. This handsome book reproduces the best of his images in short, thematic chapters arranged in chronological order to form a visual biography, capturing the places and people - including his lover Monica Jones and his friend Kingsley Amis - that meant the most to him. These haunting pictures are infused with the poignancy of everyday life that also informs his verse.

The Scottish journalist Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark (1918–2006) when he interviewed her in Arezzo, near her home in Tuscany, in 1990. In this memoir, he recounts his time spent with the novelist and her companion Penny, describing their parties, travels and idiosyncratic household arrangements. While offering an affectionate portrait of a witty, vivacious and intelligent woman, he does not shy away from controversy, particularly her bitter estrangement from her son.

Using letters and diaries, some previously unpublished, this biography uncovers the relationships that sustained four of the world’s greatest women writers: Jane Austen’s bond with the family servant and amateur playwright Anne Sharp; Charlotte Brontë’s admiration for her unconventional schoolfriend Mary Taylor; the decade-long transatlantic correspondence between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the highly charged friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

A close friend of Robert Frost, the troubled English writer Edward Thomas (b.1878) became a poet in 1914 thanks to his encouragement, and after the outbreak of the First World War almost emigrated to New England to join him. Instead, partly inspired by Frost's 'The Road Not Taken', Thomas enlisted and died in 1917 at the Battle of Arras. This award-winning biography explores the final five years of his life, which he lost so soon after finding his vocation.

A former soldier and journalist, Jan Morris became known as one of the finest travel writers of the post-war era. This biography by her long-term literary agent encapsulates the extraordinary career of an author who, as James Morris, brought back news of the conquest of Everest in 1953, and who wrote candidly about her gender reassignment in her memoir Conundrum. The text is illustrated with drawings from the visitor books kept at her Welsh home.

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) wrote novels, including the popular Cazalet Chronicles, about what love can do to people, but the romantic happiness she sought always eluded her. Based on interviews with Howard, her family and friends, this sympathetic biography reveals the ‘dangerous innocence’ that led her into a troubled marriage to Kingsley Amis, charts her attempts to make sense of her life through writing, and illuminates the literary world in which she lived. Slightly off-mint.

Graham Greene called him ‘the greatest novelist of my generation’; Hilaire Belloc thought he was possessed by the devil. Written with the family’s support and drawing on unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, this new biography reassesses the life and career of the author of Brideshead Revisited: his troubled relationship with his father, his early homosexual affairs, his conversion to Catholicism, wartime service, happy second marriage, drug-induced madness, and his sharp tongue and devastating wit.

Novelist, playwright, essayist and journalist, Klaus Mann explored the sinister appeal of Nazism in his chilling 1936 novel Mephisto, and was the first person to link racism and fascism with homophobia. This first English-language biography provides a powerful account of his tormented life, dealing frankly with his drug addiction and his troubled relationship with the overpowering figure of his father, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann, while shedding new light on his mysterious death.

John Wilmot’s life was short in years but long on scandal. Best remembered as the author of some of the most explicit verse in the English language, he had, by the time he died of syphilis at 33, ‘swived more whores more ways than Sodom’s walls’. This comprehensive biography reveals another Rochester: a devoted if inconstant husband and father, a courageous naval officer, and a poet of deep intellectual curiosity.

‘Love is three quarters curiosity,’ said Giacomo Casanova, whose name has become a byword for seduction. Though he was born in poverty in Venice, his intelligence, ambition and charm gained him entry to the courts of England, Russia and France – and to the beds of countless beautiful, aristocratic women. This biography exposes his life in rich, intimate detail, and paints a dazzling portrait of 18th-century Europe from serving girls to kings and courtiers.

The life of Stephen Spender was rich in experience – and contradictions. This affectionate, moving and often critical memoir by his son charts the poet’s friendship with Auden and Isherwood, his adventures in pre-war Germany, and his later life as a grandee of literary London. The author also probes the mysteries of his parents’ relationship: while married to the concert pianist Natasha Litvin, Spender pursued a series of affairs with young men.

The ingenious plots of Agatha Christie's mysteries continue to intrigue readers decades after they were written. How did she do it? Drawing on her unpublished notebooks, personal papers and letters, this book offers a unique insight into the mind and working methods of one of the world's most popular authors. Among the gems in these pages are Christie's own essay on Hercule Poirot, a chapter deleted from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and a previously unseen Miss Marple story. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Ursula Moray Williams (1911–2006) wrote 68 children’s books – illustrating 30 of them – plus short stories, plays and poems. Best known for Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat, she only stopped writing at 76, and died aged 95. This biography explores how Ursula’s upbringing – an identical twin, raised in a ramshackle mansion in the woods – influenced her ideas, drawing upon family anecdotes and Ursula’s unpublished letters and diaries to create a vivid picture of her fascinating life.

For the latter half of the 20th century, Gore Vidal’s writing was integral to American letters and politics, despite his self-imposed exile in Italy. Erudite and witty, he was critical of public life and successive US administrations. Drawing on 30 years’ friendship and unpublished letters and diaries, this biography looks back at his turbulent life and career, his friendships with John F Kennedy, Tennessee Williams and Princess Margaret, and his famous feuds with Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.

Poet, priest, inspirational teacher and indefatigable traveller, Peter Levi (1932–2000) was one of the most romantic and complicated of 20th-century Oxford characters. Relating his poetic development to his intense emotional life, this biography charts his Catholic upbringing, his friendships with Cyril Connolly, Iris Murdoch, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin, his often contentious membership of the Jesuit order (which he left to marry Connolly’s widow) and his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

'TS Eliot was never young': so begins Robert Crawford's superb biography of the young poet. Quoting extensively from poetry and prose, interviews and previously undisclosed memoirs, Crawford presents a full and detailed portrait of 'Tom' in his youth and early career, from his childhood in St Louis, Missouri, where he was born in 1888, to the publication of The Waste Land in New York and London in 1922.

The close and abiding friendship of Robert Harling and Ian Fleming was forged during the Second World War, when Harling was Fleming’s deputy in the commando unit dubbed ‘Fleming’s Secret Navy’. Described by Fiona MacCarthy in her foreword as ‘a master of obfuscation’, Harling fictionalized his own life and inspired characters – even elements of 007 – in Fleming’s fiction. This memoir of his friend provides an entertaining portrait of the creator of James Bond, but also a revealing self-portrait of Harling.

Paul O’Keeffe presents a compelling account of the complicated life of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). The writer, artist and co-founder of the Vorticist movement was described by TS Eliot as ‘a man of undoubted genius, but genius for what it would be remarkably difficult to say’. Off-mint.

The Nobel Prize-winning author of a dozen novels, William Golding is still remembered chiefly for his first dark vision of humanity, Lord of the Flies. Drawing on unpublished papers including the novelist’s private journal, this biography uncovers the sources of that darkness in the writer himself; a war hero who considered himself a 'monster', who battled depression and alcoholism, but put his faith above all in the imagination.

Flamboyant, eccentric and driven by nervous energy, Wilkie Collins was one of the great novelists of the Victorian era. Peter Ackroyd follows Collins’s life and career from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist through his early struggles as a writer to his lifelong friendship with Dickens, and encourages readers to explore his less well-known works as well as the two masterpieces The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge and American-cut pages.

One night in 1796, Mary Lamb killed her mother. Confined in various madhouses, she discovered a gift for writing, collaborating on the bestselling Tales from Shakespeare with her essayist brother Charles. This authoritative biography tells a story of madness, forgiveness and the redemptive power of the written word.

Maeve Binchy (1939-2012) was one of Ireland's best-loved novelists, whose sympathetic but unflinchingly honest portrayal of small-town life won the loyalty of millions of readers. This bestselling biography offers a privileged insight into her life, against the backdrop of her favourite character: Ireland. It charts Binchy's progress from girlhood in Dalkey to international acclaim, and reveals how she came to question the narrow dogma that surrounded her and find her own path to success.

Chaucer was not always the revered creator of The Canterbury Tales. As this detailed history explains, until 1386 he was a civil servant writing elegant verses for an aristocratic coterie in London. That year, a series of personal, political and financial crises drove him into exile in Kent, where he embarked on a new kind of poetry: a verse narrative that gave voice to ordinary people and ensured his recognition as one of England’s greatest poets.

This first full biography of Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) goes beyond his familiar role as husband of Virginia and member of the Bloomsbury set. Glendinning explores the many posts he filled during his long life, including colonial administrator, publisher, political writer and journal editor, and provides a full and lively portrait of a highly intelligent and complex man, who made significant contributions to the intellectual debates of his day.

From the 'happy shambles' of student life in London in the early 1930s, this book tells the story of Dylan Thomas's life and afterlife through the words and images of family, friends and writers, artists and musicians who knew him well. Structured around three portraits made by Thomas's close friend, the artist Fred Janes, these 'three lives' describe another side of the drunken hell-raiser, emphasizing instead the impact that Thomas had on those closest to him.

Few writers have evoked the spirit of London and its Kentish hinterland as vividly as Dickens. Illustrated with photographs and maps, this book takes the reader on five guided walks through the capital in the footsteps of David Copperfield and Barnaby Rudge; out to suburbs such as Hampstead, Highgate and Greenwich; and on to the Medway Towns, Dickens's home at Gad's Hill and the Kentish marshes where Pip encountered Magwitch.

Mary Shelley never knew her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died two weeks after giving birth to her in 1797. Yet, as this dual biography demonstrates, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the visionary who gave the world Frankenstein had much in common. Both defied convention, had several passionate relationships, bore children out of wedlock, lived in exile abroad, and challenged the injustices faced by women. American-cut pages and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

‘This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself.’ After reflecting on what it means to have grown old, and the nature of memory, Penelope Lively looks back at her lifetime of reading and writing, the social changes she has witnessed. She also contemplates the cherished objects that reflect her experiences, including fossil ammonites from a Dorset beach and an Egyptian potsherd decorated with leaping fish. (Previously published as Ammonites and Leaping Fish.)

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge were the daughters of friends, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and were lifelong companions themselves. Drawing on many unpublished sources, this dual biography reveals that while both women were devoted to maintaining their fathers' literary reputations, living in the shadow of such great legacy led to struggles including anorexia, drug addiction and depression.

More than 50 years after her death, Sylvia Plath's poetry still has the power to disturb. This groundbreaking biography offers a comprehensive picture of her formative years before her marriage to Ted Hughes. Drawing on previously unavailable papers and exclusive interviews with friends and lovers, it charts her fierce ambition, her troubled relationship with her father, and her many love affairs and suicide attempts, to reveal the origins of a uniquely unsettling poetic voice.

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge were lifelong friends. They were also the daughters of best friends, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic age. Drawing on many unpublished sources, this dual biography charts for the first time the lives and friendship of these two remarkable women. Devoting their energies and talents to their fathers' literary reputations, they also wrestled with the darker legacy of fame, including anorexia, drug addiction and depression.

For half a century, Diana Athill edited, coaxed, nursed and, at times, coerced a succession of novelists from Jean Rhys to Timothy Mo into producing their finest work. Elegant, clear-sighted and self- deprecating, her memoirs offer a wise and often very funny account of a life in publishing; a life in which the parade of literary luminaries takes second place to Athill's sheer love of language and literature.