Biography: literary

In 'Going with the Boys', Judith Mackrell tells the story of how six bold and resolute women became front-line war correspondents during the Second World War. Each of them had different motives for choosing so dangerous a career: Martha Gellhorn came to war journalism to save the world; Virginia ...

From the global successes of 'My Beautiful Laundrette' and 'The Buddha of Suburbia', through to late masterpieces such as 'The Nothing', Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain's most popular and versatile writers. Drawing on Kureishi's unexplored personal archive, recently acquired by the British Libra...

How was it that the novelist who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in literature had such troubled relationships with real women? In this innovative book, biographer Paula Byrne re-examines Hardy's life through the eyes of the women who made him - mother, sisters, gi...

On a pilgrimage to 'Wuthering Heights' with her best friend, Samantha Ellis found herself arguing about which heroine she liked best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, free, passionate Cathy, but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them...

On a pilgrimage to 'Wuthering Heights' with her best friend, Samantha Ellis found herself arguing about which heroine she liked best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, free, passionate Cathy, but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them...

Among the greatest of poets, T.S. Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives and a church-going companion. This presentation concealed a life-long love for an American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote (and later suppressed) over a thousand lette...

In this, the first volume of her autobiography, writer and poet Maya Angelou reflects on her childhood spent growing up in the American South of the 1930s. There she learned the power of the white townsfolk and suffered the trauma of rape.

Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the 20th century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notori...

Here is a fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers. Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ide...

Here is a fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers. Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ide...