Showing titles in Art & Literature

Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead. So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves. Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner, no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.

In this hilarious, moving memoir, much-loved children's poet and political campaigner Michael Rosen recalls the first 23 years of his life. The audiobook ends with a letter to his father and the revelation of a heartbreaking family secret.

The famous journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documents his front row seat at the pivotal events leading up to World War II. In the second of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer tells the story of his own eventful life, detailing the most notable moments of his career as a journalist stationed in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Shirer was there while Hitler celebrated his new domination of Germany, unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Poland, and began the conflict that would come to be known as World War II.

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends.

Unpublished for 90 years, Agatha Christie’s extensive and evocative letters from her year-long round-the-world trip to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America as part of the British trade mission for the famous 1924 Empire Exhibition. In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a...

English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.

From prize-winning journalist to chat show king on a show voted one of the top ten British TV programmes of all time, Michael Parkinson's starry career spans over four decades. Now an international celebrity himself, the man from a humble but colourful Yorkshire mining family who can tease out...

From the very first book publication in 1920 to the recent film release of Death on the Nile, this investigation into Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot celebrates a century of probably the world’s favourite fictional detective. This book tells his story decade-by-decade, exploring his...

Winner of four major prizes for the best critical/biographical book related to crime fiction: the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating Awards; and shortlisted for both the Agatha and Gold Dagger Awards. ‘Martin Edwards is the closest thing there has been to a philosopher of crime...

On 14 February 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been 'sentenced to death' by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being...

‘This is a funny and beautiful book. What a little bastard.’ RUSSELL BRAND ‘A millennial's answer to David Sedaris. No writer is funnier than Joel Golby.’ DOLLY ALDERTON A collection of full-throated appreciations, withering assessments, and hard-won lessons by the popular journalist...

'Tender and revelatory, Blythe Spirit gives us both the patron saint of the English countryside and a frank portrait of a complex figure' MARK COCKER, COUNTRY LIFE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Moving, candid, vivid, it is all that we could hope for in a memoir of this unique and treasured writer' ROWAN...

A brilliantly original exploration of our obsession with the end of the world, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go. 'Brilliant, scholarly, sharp and witty’ – Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived 'Will make...

'A historical document, capturing a pivotal moment in the evolution of the role of first lady when clothing became an even bigger part of communication. When, in other words, dress became an officially recognized part of the job.' Vanessa Friedman, New York Times *** Beautifully illustrated with...

A revealing history that explores the artistry, craftmanship, and traditions behind the royal wardrobe. "A truly wonderful and fascinating book!"—Lady Anne Glenconner From tours and walkabouts to the dazzling spectacle of a wedding or Coronation, the clothes worn by royal women have always...

Mark Twain's wit and wisdom is timeless. Mark Twain's Hawaii: A Humorous Romp through History, combines Twain's own writings on Hawaii with personal reminiscences by others who met him at that time, and traces Twain's journey through the region just as he experienced it in 1866. The book...

Il n'existe aucun mot dans la langue française pour désigner la fratrie au féminin. Un oubli dont on peut aisément déterminer les causes : une fratrie uniquement composée de filles a longtemps été considérée comme un échec dans nos sociétés où la descendance passe par les fils. Pourtant, des Petites Filles modèles à Kate et Pippa Middleton, de Simone et Hélène de Beauvoir à Venus et Serena Williams, des sept Pléiades antiques aux sœurs Halliwell de Charmed, les exemples héroïques et ordinaires sont nombreux.

From Gaza to the White House, she carried the stories of people the world tried to forget. Raised in Palestine, Nadia Bilbassy grew up in a place where beauty and hardship existed side by side—where family, memory, and resilience were woven into daily life, even as conflict pressed in from all...

In the early decades of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and several of their friends and colleagues at Oxford University began meeting together to share and discuss their writing. Some were novelists, poets, philosophers, and scholars, while others were simply there to revel in language, stories, and ideas.

Agatha Christie is one of our most beloved authors—a storyteller unparalleled in her clever plots and twisting tales. But Agatha was also a forensic expert; in each of her books she employs an expert weaving of human observation, ingenuity and genuine science of the era. In Murder Isn't Easy Carla Valentine illuminates all of Agatha's incredible knowledge, showing how she stayed at the cutting edge of forensics from ballistics to fingerprint analysis, as seen through much-loved characters such as Poirot and Miss Marple.