Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000

Published to celebrate Katherine Mansfield's centenary, this is a compact but comprehensive new portrait of her life, work, relevance and wonderfully inspiring personality.

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando - before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In 'The Book at War', acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree t...

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one...

Here is an engrossing biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazi...

Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'His poetry is so very brave, so u...

This is the second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, T.S. Eliot. It tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life.

Takes us on an eye-opening journey in a pea-green boat through the history of picture books. From Edward Lear through to Beatrix Potter and contemporary picture books like 'Stick Man', Clare Pollard shines a light on some of our best-loved childhood stories, their histories and what they really m...

Eastern Europe is disappearing. Not off the map of course, but as an idea. Today it calls to mind a jumble of post-Soviet states paved over with C&A and McDonald's. We could describe Eastern Europe as a group of 20 nations - but why? For most of their history, they weren't nations at all. The reg...

Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger's work and friendship had on her working life as a GP. It includes extracts from letters that span 20 years of her correspondence with Berger.

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smal...