Unconventional, anarchic and almost impossibly erudite, Richard Cobb was one of the most distinguished British historians of last century and an inveterate letter writer. This selection by a former pupil presents Cobb at his epistolary best.

TS Eliot entrusted the selection and editing of his letters to his wife Valerie, and in these volumes she presents the correspondence in chronological order, with detailed notes and, at the end of each volume, biographical notes on the correspondents, an index of correspondents and a general index.

During the crucial years covered by Volume III, Eliot set a new course for his life and work: he was received into the Church of England and naturalized as a British citizen; and there was a new manner and vision in his poetry, with the first of the Ariel poems, 'Journey of the Magi' in 1927.

TS Eliot entrusted the selection and editing of his letters to his wife Valerie, and in these volumes she presents the correspondence in chronological order, with detailed notes and, at the end of each volume, biographical notes on the correspondents, an index of correspondents and a general index.

This first volume of the Letters originally appeared in 1988 and is republished in this revised edition with approximately 200 new items. It covers the years from the poet's childhood in St Louis, Missouri to 1922, by which time he had settled in England and published The Waste Land.

TS Eliot entrusted the selection and editing of his letters to his wife Valerie, and in these volumes she presents the correspondence in chronological order, with detailed notes and, at the end of each volume, biographical notes on the correspondents, an index of correspondents and a general index.

The prolific and varied correspondence in this second volume reflects Eliot's profoundly influential work as editor of the Criterion and cultural commentator. It demonstrates not only the emerging continuities between his thinking as poet and essayist, but also their relation to his friendships and personal circumstances.

Donal MacCarron tells the story of an early pioneer aviator who took to the air soon after the Wright brothers proved that man was capable of controlled powered flight. A record-breaking amateur before 1914, Corbett Wilson signed up with the Royal Flying Corps at the outbreak of war. His letters from France to his mother vividly describe the life of a RFC airman in the First World War. He was shot down and killed in 1915.

This first volume of the authoritative edition of Hemingway's letters covers his experiences in the First World War and his arrival in Paris, and offers, at first-hand, insights into his inspirations and creative process.

Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) was one of the most influential English composers of the 20th century. This biography charts his life and career in his own words. After an introduction by Dickinson, who first met Berkeley in 1956, it presents its subject's account of the musical life of Paris between the wars, his letters to his teacher Nadia Boulanger, and his first-hand memories of fellow composers Ravel, Poulenc, Stravinsky and Britten, as well as Dickinson's interviews with Berkeley's colleagues and friends.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Sir William Hamilton was George III's ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples and his letters to the English court, 1798 to 1799, provide a vivid, day-by-day account of European events.

This selection of 100 letters by Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) shows him to be a letter-writer of rare accomplishment in the tradition of Madame de Sevigne or Horace Walpole. The book contains only private correspondence, setting the great historian and controversialist in a more intimate light, but also discussing informally topics such as his abhorrence of Communism and the infamous Hitler diaries affair.

A niece of Jane Austen and a novelist herself, Catherine Hubback was 52 when she left England to settle in Oakland, California, where her son worked as a grain merchant. Her letters to family back home - published here for the first time - convey her delight and exasperation at her new environment, and bring a novelist's eye to bear on the people of the rapidly expanding San Francisco Bay area. An introduction charts the life of this adventurous and resourceful woman.

This is a critical edition of the letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, whose works Murray published. Spanning eleven years, from 1811 to 1822, the letters tell us a great deal about Byron's works and their publication, and about the aims, literary interests and vicissitudes of his publisher. They also reveal the very special relationship that existed between the two men, both on a personal level and in their professional and artistic capacities.

'Novelist, biographer and chronicler of American life', Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was also a prolific letter-writer. Selected from some 45,000 pieces of correspondence, and edited with introductions to each decade by J Michael Lennon, this volume includes letters to family, friends, fellow writers, political figures and cultural icons such as John Lennon and Marlon Brando. It is, in effect, an autobiographical portrait of one of America's greatest writers and one of the 20th century's most provocative intellectuals. American-cut pages.

Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world'. Christopher Reid has selected nearly 300 letters which show the many facets of Hughes: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. Spanning the poet's life, from age 17 to a few days before his death in 1998, the letters are accompanied by Reid's notes on their biographical and literary context.

Captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Charles Steel experienced the horrors of Changi Prison and forced labour on the Burma Railway. This book is an edited collection of the 183 letters he wrote to his wife during the period, which were hidden until liberation. Remaining remarkably upbeat in the face of adversity, the letters report on conditions, his fellow POWs, the Japanese guards and work on the railway.

Aristocrat, socialite, actress and wife of Duff Cooper, Churchill's wartime Minister for Information, later Ambassador to France and Viscount Norwich, Diana Cooper was also an inveterate letter-writer. Gathered here, her missives to her only son John Julius Norwich during the Second World War and its aftermath provide a vivid picture of the age and its personalities, and a woman of great intelligence, happiest on her country smallholding but able to cope with the demands on a politician's wife.

This volume of over 350 letters written by William Beckford (1760-1844) to his bookseller George Clarke between 1830 and 1834 gives a vivid picture of the insatiable connoisseur in the act of gathering his extraordinary collection of printed books. The correspondence is the most complete documentary record of Beckford's libraries, both at Fonthill Abbey and in Bath, but also illuminates the contemporary world of the London book trade, wealthy collectors, publishers and auction houses.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) would spend up to four hours a day on her correspondence, writing to friends, lovers, students, fans and even casual acquaintances. This selection of her letters, edited and introduced by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, gives a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life lived to capacity and marked by numerous emotional imbroglios and intense friendships with fellow philosopher Philippa Foot and novelist Brigid Brophy, alongside a long and stable marriage to John Bayley.

Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn began their correspondence during the Second Dutch War of 1664-7 when both men were involved with war casualties, Pepys as Clerk of the Acts and Evelyn as a Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen and Prisoners of War. Evelyn's final letter, some 40 years later, is dated a few months before Pepys's death in 1703. Illuminating their friendship and Restoration society generally, this is a complete and fully annotated edition of all the letters that passed between the two great diarists.

After a disastrous marriage, Rosina Bulwer-Lytton (1802-1882) earned her living writing novels. In books such as Cheveley, or The Man of Honour (1839) she vilified her ex-husband, but also successfully drew attention to the plight of abused and separated women generally. Her letters, spanning 1825 to 1881, reveal the intensity of her efforts to expose Bulwer-Lytton's wrong-doings and the difficulty of her life as a single woman separated from her children, and as a writer. No jackets.

At the beginning of October 1831 the young Charles Darwin left Shrewsbury to begin a 5-year journey which would turn his mind towards evolutionary theory. This volume brings together the letters which he wrote and received during his voyage on the Beagle, recounting both scientific observations and adventures ranging from an earthquake and political revolution to his efforts at ostrich- catching. Watercolours by the ship's artist Conrad Martens complement the text, depicting the landscapes and animals seen by Darwin.

Monica Jones was Philip Larkin's lover and confidant for 40 years until his death in 1985. On her death in 2001, almost 2000 letters, postcards and telegrams came to light. Relaxed, intimate, affectionate and often very funny, they chronicle, day by day, almost every aspect of Larkin's life: his poetry and the events that shaped it, his work as a librarian, his friendships, and his insights on literature, from Hardy and DH Lawrence to WH Auden and Kingsley Amis.

Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991) will always be known for his handwritten, hand-drawn Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. Throughout his life, he was an eloquent and witty correspondent, as this selection of letters, compiled by his biographer and fellow Lakeland resident Hunter Davies testifies. Written to friends, publishers, fans of his guidebooks, and to Betty, his great love and second wife, they reveal a more sensitive character, eccentric, tough-minded yet innocent, than his bluff public persona would suggest.

In the late 1720's, Edmund Burt went to Scotland to work as an engineer on Highland roads and bridges. From his base in Inverness he wrote regularly to a friend in London, describing his experiences and relaying information on everything from the clan system to the scourge of malhoulakins (midges). Written 20 years before Culloden, long before the Highland clearances and first published in 1754, the letters offer a rare picture of contemporary Highland life. The present single-volume edition is introduced by Charles Withers.

A major poet of the First World War, Isaac Rosenberg died at the front, near Arras, in 1918. Writing in the trenches, he was able to transmute into poetry what he described as 'the strange and extraordinary conditions of this new life'. Jean Liddiard, Rosenberg's biographer, presents a selection of his poems and letters along with a substantial introduction to his life and work.

Christopher Isherwood was a world-famous novelist when he met Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. Despite a 30-year age gap, they lived as an openly gay couple in closeted Hollywood. In these charming letters, Isherwood is the stubborn old workhorse Dobbin, Bachardy the playful young Kitty. Candid and affectionate, they draw the reader into the private world of the Animals, offer gossipy sketches of Isherwood's writer and actor friends, and chart Bachardy's burgeoning career as a painter.

Once regarded primarily as a member of the Auden-Isherwood set, Louis MacNeice is now considered one of the greatest Irish poets of the 20th century. This magisterial collection of his letters - to recipients including his family and fellow poets Auden, Eliot and Larkin - offers a humane, witty reflection on his Irish Protestant heritage, his turbulent love life, his work at the BBC - and an enthusiastic celebration of what he described in his poem 'Snow' as 'the drunkenness of things being various'.

Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) was one of the great letter writers of the last century, and her sparkling correspondence to her famous family and wide circle of friends sheds an extraordinary light on their lives and the times in which they lived. The first published collection of Nancy Mitford's correspondence, this volume draws on 8,000 letters spanning six decades from 1912 to 1973. With introductions, notes and biographical notes on recipients.

One of the funniest writers of the 20th century, PG Wodehouse shied away from a biography. Drawing on unpublished sources, this definitive edition of his letters gives an unrivalled insight into his life and his comic creations. Covering his schooldays, his family's financial troubles, his musical comedy career in New York and the unhappy episode when, interned by the Germans, he was accused of broadcasting Nazi propaganda, it is a book every fan of Jeeves and Wooster will want.

For more than 30 years, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius corresponded in a mixture of French and German with Rosa Harriet Newmarch, Britain's leading authority on Russian music. Now published in a complete English translation for the first time, their letters, notes and telegrams reveal the intensity of their friendship, provide some of Sibelius' frankest statements about his own works and illuminate Newmarch's important contribution to British musical life. An appendix reprints her analytical programme note on the 4th Symphony.

This biography is based on the letters and diaries of Grenadier Guardsman General Sir Francis Lloyd (1853-1926) who became GOC London District in 1913 and, throughout the war, had sweeping powers, including running hospitals, railway termini and the capital's defences.

Revered as an artist, Vincent van Gogh was also an impassioned and eloquent letter writer whose correspondence displays a remarkable literary gift and the ability to communicate his ideas about nature, art and life in direct, emotive language. Illustrated with works of art and letters that demonstrate van Gogh's abiding preoccupations - such as the role of colour in painting and the cycles of nature - this magnificent volume explores the letters as a self-portrait of the artist.