Biography

'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...'At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat - and sapphist - Vita Sackville-West. Virginia wrote in her diary that she didn't think much of Vita's conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. It was to be the start of almost twenty years of flirtation, friendship, and literary collaboration. Their correspondence ended only with Virginia's death in 1941. Intimate and playful, these selected letters and diary entries allow us to hear these women's constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Eavesdrop on the affair that inspired Virginia to write her most fantastical novel, Orlando, and discover a relationship that - even a hundred years later - feels radical and relatable.

At the time of his death Eric Hobsbawm was the most famous historian in the world. He not only wrote history was also witness to it, from the Communist uprising in Europe to revolution in Cuba where he was Che Guevara's interpreter. He was instrumental in the birth of New Labour and was also a jazz journalist for The New Statesman. This is the story of his family life. Marlene Hobsbawm grew up in a comfortable middle class Jewish home in Vienna but that life was shattered by the rise of Nazism. Age five she fled the country with her family and settled in the UK. A talented linguist, Marlene worked post-war for the UN in Italy helping to rebuild the country and then onto war torn Congo. Returning to the UK she met Eric Hobsbawm. This is the story of their roller coaster life together, much of it spent under the scrutiny of M15.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated polymath, a lover of Greece and the best company in the world. Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Paddy and his cloest friends as well as having complete access to his archives. Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.

In 1907, Princess Sophy ('Sofka') DolgorOuky was born in St Petersburg. Members of the Imperial family had attended her parents' wedding earlier that same year, and the child was born into a privileged world of nurses, private tutors and elegant tea parties. The Russian Revolution caused the princess to flee across Europe to England, but it was the Second World War that left the deepest marks on her adult life. During those years, she left her first husband and lost her second. Later, she was interned in a Nazi prison camp, where she discovered Communism and showed great bravery in defending the rights of the Jewish prisoners. It was her Communism which took her back to the Soviet Union as an improbable tour guide for British workers. And Communism, albeit indirectly, brought her the last love of her life, Jack, a working-class Londoner who had never been abroad. Sofka's colourful life also included a close friendship with Laurence Olivier, innumerable lovers, some serious, some quickly discarded, and an abiding love of reading and especially poetry. This affectionate portrait of the 'red princess' by her granddaughter and namesake uses letter, diaries and interviews to recreate a vanished world and also explore the author's own Russian roots.

Before Francoise Sagan the literary icon there was Francoise Queiroz, an eighteen-year-old Parisian girl, who wrote a novel and needed a publisher for it. This intimate narrative charts the months in 1954 leading up to the publication of the legendary Bonjour Tristesse. We encounter Francoise, her family and friends close-up, in a post-war world that is changing radically; and Mlle Queiroz, in her new guise of Francoise Sagan, will be at the heart of that social change. Sagan was always focused on her writing, though at times the fame of her books was to be eclipsed by her wild-child reputation. Yet, as Anne Berest herself testifies, Sagan's fearless approach to life lived on her own terms remains an inspiration even now.

""I've never seen a Bob Dylan smile, except in photos or on the stage. Not the real thing."" Britta Lee Shain was a friend of Bob Dylan's until he asked her to join him on the road in the mid 1980s, at which point she became more than a friend. In this intimate and elliptical memoir of their time together, at home in Los Angeles and on tour with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, she offers a unique portrait of the romantic, earthbound, and poetic soul trapped in the role of Being Bob Dylan. ""If you were my woman, I'd be worth four times as much."" Entire libraries of books have been written about Dylan, but few--if any--offer any lasting insight into the man behind the shades. Until now. Written with the elegance of a poet and storytelling snap of a novelist, "Seeing The Real You At Last" is a poignant and tender romance that reveals Dylan's playfulness, his dark wit, his fears and struggles, his complex relationships with the men and women in his life, and, ultimately, his genius.

From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award.
The masterpiece of the 'I knew Susan' minigenre - A.O. Scott, The New York Times

A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America's most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute.

Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, "Who says we have to live like everyone else?"

Sontag's influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as "a natural mentor" who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, "someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer's vocation."

Published more than six years after Sontag's death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

A unique history of the Beats, in the words of the movement's most central member, Allen Ginsberg, based on a seminal series of his lecturesIn 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem 'Howl', Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation - partly to preserve his own memories of those years. The Best Minds of My Generation presents the best of these candid, intimate and illuminating lectures, revealing Kerouac, Burroughs and the rest of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors and fellow visionaries in a group who started a revolution. 'Marvellous ... spellbinding ... preserving intact the story of the literary movement Ginsberg led, promoted and never ceased to embody' The New York Times Book Review'An awesome exhaustive feat ... fascinatingly readable' Sunday Times'Astonishingly intimate ... Full of penetrating insight and fascinating literary gossip, the book is a major contribution to the core Beat canon ... situates the Beats in cultural history in a way that no other exploration of their work does' San Francisco Chronicle