Biography: literary

In 'Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know', the author turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers.

In the 1850s, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot - an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes - writer, philosopher and married father of three. After 'eloping' to Berlin in 1854 th...

The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of 'Private Lives', 'Hay Fever', and 'Blithe Spirit' is not in production somewhere in the world. Phrases from Noël Coward's songs - 'Mad About The Boy', 'Mad Dogs and Englishman' - ar...

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.

Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath are three of our most famous authors - this book tells the story of the remarkable mothers, who shaped them. Julia Stephen, Clara Miller, and Aurelia Plath were fascinating women in their own rights, and their relationships with their daughters we...

Just shy of 18, Deborah Orr left Motherwell - the town she both loved and hated - to go to university. It was a decision her mother railed against from the moment the idea was raised. Win had very little agency in the world, every choice was determined by the men in her life. And strangely, she w...

Just shy of 18, Deborah Orr left Motherwell - the town she both loved and hated - to go to university. It was a decision her mother railed against from the moment the idea was raised. Win had very little agency in the world, every choice was determined by the men in her life. And strangely, she w...

Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died - an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westmin...

Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died - an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westmin...

When Graham Caveney was in his early twenties he began to suffer from what was eventually diagnosed as agoraphobia. What followed were decades of managing his condition and learning to live within the narrow limits it imposed on his life: no motorways, no dual carriageways, no shopping centres, l...