Biography: literary

Graham Greene (1904-91) wrote of Pinkie the mobster, Harry Lime, and the whisky priest, but his own life was the strangest of all his stories. Surviving a tortured adolescence, he sought distraction in Russian Roulette, women, espionage, jungle treks, war reporting, and opium. A Catholic convert,...

There are few labels not attached to Aphra Behn - playwright, poet, a spy, a scarlet woman condemned for loose morals. And yet, for all her notoriety Aphra Behn is an enigma. Born in around 1640, her early life isn't well recorded and facts about her are continually disputed. Her birth name may h...

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I's favourite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As the king's lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of 17th-century royal...

John Le Carré led a life entirely constructed of secrets - not just in his first career, as a British spy and agent runner during the height of the Cold War or in his second, as a world-renowned writer of espionage fiction, but also in his personal involvements. He guarded his private life with ...

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades. To keep these relationships secret, he m...

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades. To keep these relationships secret, he m...

A sudden death in the family delivers Julia a box of love letters. Dusty with age, they tell the story of an illicit affair between the brilliant twentieth-century novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, and a young academic called Humphry House - Julia's grandfather. Using fascinating unpublished corresponde...

Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright.

Discover the lives and work of four ambitious Renaissance women who, against all odds, made themselves heard - and read - in the time of Shakespeare. In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen ...

Drawing on diaries, letters, interviews alongside a close reading of Hazzard's fiction - Brigitta Olubas, herself Australian - tells the story of a girl from the suburbs 'with a head full of poetry' who fell early under the spell of words and sought out first books and then people who loved books...