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Basil Clarke was an intrepid First World War correspondent and father of the public relations industry. This first-ever biography tells how he defied Kitchener’s ban on reporters in 1914 to live as an ‘outlaw’ in Dunkirk, reported from the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising, and caused a global scandal by accusing the government of failing to enforce its naval blockade of Germany, before going on to create Britain’s first PR firm.

In 1939 Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), a disciple of Freud, fled from Nazi Germany to America, where he continued to pursue research into the climate, the effects of radiation and new therapeutic techniques. Presenting material from his diaries, letters and laboratory notebooks, this fourth volume of autobiographical writings covers the final decade of his life, when he was harassed and eventually jailed by the US authorities, who burned his research and banned the use of his experimental orgone energy accumulator.

The comedian and impressionist Samuel Foote (1720–77) was a superstar of the Georgian stage but was ruined by a media storm and two scandalous trials. This biography covers Foote’s early success with a true-crime book about his uncle’s murder; his long-forgotten satirical works; the roles he created; the disastrous practical joke that cost him a leg; and the ‘sodomitical’ circumstances of his fall from grace.

As the author of hugely acclaimed science fiction, including Solaris (1961), the Polish ‘intellectual oracle’ Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) corresponded frequently with his principal American translator, Michael Kandel. The letters, selected, edited and translated here by Peter Swirski, date from 1972 to 1987 and illuminate Lem’s thought on writing, literature and translation, philosophy, science, politics – and the quest to make it big in America.

Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) was Scotland’s best-loved poet since Robert Burns, and its first official Makar of modern times. Written with his full cooperation, this biography reveals for the first time his multiple identities as an academic, cultural activist, radical writer, international traveller and gay man. Exploring hitherto unknown archive sources and unpublished letters, poems and plays, it recounts his brilliant and sometimes troubled career, and movingly celebrates his astonishing creativity in the face of the ‘last dragon’, cancer.

In 1891, the first issue of The Strand magazine appeared; it was an immediate and massive success, mainly due to the debut of Sherlock Holmes in its pages. In this study of the relationship between Holmes's creator and the magazine, Mike Ashley first sketches the early career paths of Conan Doyle, the publisher George Newnes and editor Greenhough Smith before exploring their extraordinary achievement and Doyle’s subsequent 40-year association with The Strand up to his death in 1930.

In 1920, following a courteous correspondence, ardent spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and sceptical showman Harry Houdini met for the first time. Two of the era’s most famous men, they became the public faces of debate about the possibility of bridging the gap between living and dead. Sandford draws on previously unpublished material in this account of the two men’s unlikely friendship, which turned to increasingly bitter enmity.