Biography: literary

A celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisa...

A Byron biography like no other - published to mark the bicentennial of his death - it tells the remarkable life story of the celebrated Romantic poet through ten of his best, most resonant letters. Using Byron's correspondence, Stauffer relates a vivid and engaging story of creativity, fame, sex...

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...

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...

Paul Foot was one of the most powerful and influential investigative reporters of his generation. For nearly 50 years he was the scourge of corrupt politicians and dodgy businessmen, and the champion of the causes of working people, the under-represented and the underprivileged. In this biography...

When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine, which charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their famous friends and lovers.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire v...

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...

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...

'Straight Acting' is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act str...