Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000

This is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called 'Demon Dog of Crime Fiction', Ellroy enjoys a celebrity status and notoriety that few authors can match. However, traumas from the past have shadowed his literary success. Whe...

Dorian Lynskey charts the life of George Orwell's '1984', one of the most influential books of the 20th Century, a perennial bestseller, and a work that remains more relevant than ever in today's tumultuous world.

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves 'The Sisterhood', the group - which also came to include A...

Jimi Hendrix, Princess Diana and Syria's Asma Al-Assad rub shoulders with Auden, Eliot and Shelley - and with the Trouser Thief Clive met during ten long weeks locked up in a closed psychiatric ward - in this offbeat and affectionate poetic biography. Since 2010, when Clive was told he had three ...

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H.G. Wells' extraordinary...

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H.G. Wells' extraordinary...