Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly entertaining letter writer. This judiciously edited selection of his correspondence spans almost 70 years, and includes letters to Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. They sparkle with his humour, zest for life, unending curiosity, lyrical descriptive powers – and his tendency to get into scrapes. Off-mint.

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

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first met Véra Slonim at an émigre ball in Berlin in 1923, they married in 1925 and stayed married until the novelist’s death in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1977. Ranging across topics from poetry to collecting the laundry, their correspondence, edited here by Olga Voronina and Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd, tells the story of a beguiling marriage of hearts and minds and sheds much light on Nabokov’s life and work as a writer. American cut pages and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge. Off-mint.

Of all the Mitford sisters, Jessica – known to her friends as Decca – was the most radical, a Communist Party member and passionate supporter of civil rights. She was also, as this volume demonstrates, a prolific, witty and entertaining letter writer, whose address book read like an international Who’s Who, from Guy Burgess and Martin Luther King to Hillary Clinton and Liberace. Peter Y Sussman’s introduction, essays and notes provide fascinating biographical and historical context.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Covering the period from 1747 to the eve of the French Revolution, the letters in this volume include both religious and political debate, and the emergence of a theologically distinct Unitarian denomination. No jacket.

Volume II covers the period from the French Revolution to Lindsey’s death in 1808, and reveals his central role in the formation of Unitarianism, and his involvement in movements for political and religious reform. No jacket.

This collection of letters to and from the harpsichordist, scholar and early music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick spans his career, from Paris in the 1930s to the 1980s, and includes a selection of family letters as well as correspondence with composers and colleagues.

Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly entertaining letter writer. This judiciously edited selection of his correspondence spans almost 70 years, and includes letters to Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. They sparkle with his humour, zest for life, unending curiosity, lyrical descriptive powers – and his tendency to get into scrapes.

Jennifer Worth (1935–2011) based her hugely successful books, Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End, on her own experiences in the East End in the 1950s. This book contains letters from all sorts of people – from other midwives to lorry drivers – responding to the books and telling their own stories. There are also writings by Jennifer herself, a biographical introduction by family members and a foreword by Miranda Hart.

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. Alongside banal family details and fanatical devotion to the Nazi cause, they reveal him to have been much closer to Hitler than previously thought, and remove any doubt that he was the architect of the Final Solution.

No. 102 Boulevard Haussmann is an elegant address in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. Upstairs lives Madame Williams, with her second husband and her harp; downstairs, Marcel Proust is trying to write In Search of Lost Time. Between 1909 and 1919, a correspondence that starts with a request for silence develops into a touching friendship, discussing books, music, domestic arrangements, illness, and the sadness of losing friends in the war.

Spanning Thomas’s Welsh childhood, his early career and marriage, this volume charts his growing confidence as a poet as he experiments with ideas, submits work for publication, and corresponds with prominent figures in the literary world, including TS Eliot, Stephen Spender and Edith Sitwell.

The letters in this second volume cover the years of fame, the exhilaration and pain of Thomas’s tempestuous marriage to Caitlin Macnamara, his drinking and his hell-raising. They record the creation of Under Milk Wood, and the slide into alcoholism that claimed his life during a poetry-reading tour in New York.

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.

In chapters devoted to each monarch – Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I – this is a narrative account of the Tudor period, told through 42 letters and documents in the British Library’s collections. From Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s autograph inscriptions in a prayer book, to a letter from Elizabeth I to James VI of Scotland in 1603, each item is illustrated in colour, fully transcribed and accompanied by a commentary setting it in historical context.

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.Dylan Thomas The Collected Letters Volume I: 1931–1939 (Read more...)Dylan Thomas The Collected Letters Volumes II: 1939–1953 (Read more...)

Off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.