While volunteering as a nurse for the Union Army, Louisa May Alcott recorded her experiences in letters home, giving a raw, honest depiction of the realities of battlefield medicine and contemporary warfare.

Ranging from diplomatic correspondence of the 14th century BCE to letters by Bette Davis and Iggy Pop, these 125 historic missives are by turns witty, poignant and enlightening. To quote Shaun Usher’s letter to the reader, ‘I can think of no better way to learn about the past than through the often candid correspondence of those who lived it’. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Letters of Note was an unexpected publishing sensation - a crowd-funded anthology of letters that became an international bestseller. This follow-up delivers the same mix of the tragic, the comic, the heartfelt and the historically significant. Illustrated with colour facsimiles of the original letters, it includes Richard Burton's farewell note to Elizabeth Taylor on their divorce, David Bowie's touching reply to his first American fan letter, and the final missive from a doomed Japan Airlines flight.

While serving as an orderly at a military hospital during the First World War, the artist Stanley Spencer met Desmond Chute, the aesthetic son of a Bristol theatre family, who introduced him to classical literature, including the Confessions of St Augustine. Illustrated with facsimiles and drawings that shed light on Spencer’s artistic development, these 31 letters document the men’s friendship, Spencer’s service in Macedonia and his memories of the village of Cookham.

Drawing on the Royal Archives and the archives at Glamis Castle, the Queen Mother's official biographer presents a selection of letters written by Elizabeth to her family, friends and a circle of acquaintance that included Winston Churchill, Benjamin Britten and Ted Hughes. Covering all phases of her life – as Elizabeth Bowes- Lyon, Duchess of York, Queen Consort and Queen Mother – the letters illuminate a personality described by her grandson, Prince Charles, as 'wise, loving, with an utterly irresistible mischievousness of spirit'. Off-mint.

Mme Marie Williams, the wife of an American dentist, lived in the apartment directly above Marcel Proust’s in 102 Boulevard Haussmann and, despite their proximity, Proust and Mme Williams wrote to one another. Proust’s were often about the noise, yet always exquisitely expressed and often accompanied by flowers; the 23 letters are presented here with a foreword by Jean-Yves Tadié. Translated, with an afterword, by Lydia Davis.

Much of Mikhail Bulgakov’s career was a struggle with Soviet censorship, and his greatest novel, The Master and Margarita, remained unpublished in his lifetime. These chronological extracts from his diaries and letters – their recipients included Stalin himself – run from 1921 to 1940, and record his initial success and subsequent fall from favour, including his interrogation by the secret police.

The Devonshire family stood at the pinnacle of Georgian society, and the two duchesses who bore that title were prolific correspondents. Drawing on unique access to family papers, Elizabeth’s grandson Vere Foster published these transcriptions of their letters in 1896. With correspondents including the Prince Regent, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the Emperor of Russia, they provide a rare insight into the political and cultural life of the Napoleonic era.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Misunderstood by his peers but hailed by later generations as the father of modern art, Cézanne has long fascinated artists and art lovers, writers, poets and philosophers. This new annotated translation of his letters provides fresh insight into his views on art, politics, literature and friendship. Illustrated with more than 70 images, this book enriches our knowledge of the artist and the man, who emerges as wittier, wiser, more irascible, more philosophical, and above all, more fully human.

After Himmler’s suicide in 1945, his letters were believed lost. Then, in 2014, they were discovered in Tel Aviv and authenticated by historians. Edited by his great-niece, they present a chilling glimpse into the mind of a mass murderer. His correspondence with his family presents a man whose life was governed by logic rather than empathy, and who considered his actions in the war to be a necessary and decent duty befitting the ‘great times’ he lived in.

The artist Stanley Spencer made several attempts to write an autobiography, but completed none of them. His grandson has combined these fragments with his notebooks, diaries and letters to provide a first-hand account of his life. Illustrated with Spencer’s paintings and drawings alongside period photographs, the resulting narrative records the development of his art and personality from his childhood in Cookham through his training at the Slade to his experiences in the First World War.

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...)

During the last decade of his life Leoš Janácek sent hundreds of passionate letters to Kamila Stösslová, a married woman half his age. Selections from their correspondence are translated in this volume, with linking commentary, photographs and a decoding of the lovers’ erotic references. Their words reveal how much this relationship inspired the composer’s final, greatest works – including the String Quartet ‘Intimate Letters’ – and shed valuable light on his personality.

Off-mint.

Drawing on the Royal Archives and the archives at Glamis Castle, the Queen Mother's official biographer presents a selection of letters written by Elizabeth to her family, friends and a circle of acquaintance that included Winston Churchill, Benjamin Britten and Ted Hughes. Covering all phases of her life - as Elizabeth Bowes- Lyon, Duchess of York, Queen Consort and Queen Mother - the letters illuminate a personality described by her grandson, Prince Charles, as 'wise, loving, with an utterly irresistible mischievousness of spirit'. Off-mint.

A giant of 20th century poetry, Ted Hughes (1930–98) was also a prolific letter writer, with a private voice as original and compelling as his verse. This selection ranges from his teenage National Service to his last weeks. The recipients include his family in Yorkshire, his wife Sylvia Plath and lover Assia Wevill, and fellow poets such as Seamus Heaney. Warm, insightful and often humorous, the letters report on domestic life, fishing expeditions, world affairs and the craft of poetry.

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.

Alan Bennett's sharp, funny, humane observations have made him one of the foremost chroniclers of modern British life. This collection includes his diaries from 2005 to 2015, the decade that saw his civil partnership, four premieres at the National Theatre, and the filming of The Lady in the Van. It also contains his provocative sermon on private education, his darkly comic radio play Denmark Hill and his reflections on his 25-year collaboration with the director Nicholas Hytner.

A leading counterculture guru of the 1960s, Timothy Leary promoted LSD and coined the hippie mantra ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’. This book sets more than 100 previously unpublished letters – to Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg and others – within a narrative recounting his journey from Harvard professor to a fugitive Richard Nixon called ‘the most dangerous man in America’.

Imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895, Oscar Wilde wrote this long, impassioned letter to his estranged lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Describing the joy and despair of love, it also reveals his views on art, Christianity and incarceration.