Biography: literary

The life of Ian Fleming, sportsman, womaniser, naval commander and spy, often provided the backdrop to his Bond novels. Lycett delves into the life of this man and reveals a much more complicated character than that of his fictional hero.

In 1953, Ian Fleming's literary sensation James Bond emerged onto the world's stage. Nearly seven decades later, he has become a multi-billion-pound film franchise, now equipped with all the gizmos of the modern world. Yet Fleming's creation, who battled his way through the fourteen novels from 1...

Doomed survivor of a family of geniuses, Charlotte Brontë had a life as dramatic as Jane Eyre. Turning her back on her tragic past, she reinvented herself as an acclaimed writer, a mysterious celebrity, and a lover. Doing so meant burning many bridges, but her sudden death left her friends and a...

'Letters to Gil' is Malik Al Nasir's profound coming of age memoir - the story of surviving abuse and finding a sense of self under the wing of the great artist, poet and civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron.

A few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next. Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers ...

Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. As this erudite and entertaining work shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power.

A selection of Iris Murdoch's most interesting and important letters has been collected together to give us a full, living portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work - we see the young Murdoch struggling with difficult philosophical ...

A dazzling blend of literary criticism, biography and memoir, 'Look! We Have Come Through!' is a spellbinding exhumation of an author, and a compelling manifesto for exposing ourselves to difficult and dangerous views.

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...

This full-length biography explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as 'The Red Pony', 'Of Mice and Men' and 'The Grapes of Wrath'.