Biography: literary

Andrew Motion has been close to the centres of British poetry for over fifty years. 'Sleeping on Islands' is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of a remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence - where writing was as much a refuge as an...

In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs experienced a series of bereavements. As she grieved, she kept busy by day, but at night sleep eluded her. And yet her sleeplessness led to a profound and unexpected discovery: her Night Self. As the night transformed into a place of creativity and liberation, ...

In London during the interwar years, five women's lives intertwined around one address. Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist J...

In London during the interwar years, five women's lives intertwined around one address. Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H.D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Ja...

Josie George lives in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands with her son. Since her early childhood, she has lived with the fluctuating and confusing challenge of disabling chronic illness. Her days are watchful and solitary, lived out in the same hundred or so metres around her home. ...

'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...

In October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel at San Francisco State College. The troubled state of American society was under discussion, which Baldwin incisively diagnosed as a 'failure of the masculine sensibility'. This book explores this crisis in mid-century masculinity a...

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the Engli...

Roger Deakin, author of the immortal 'Waterlog' and 'Wildwood,' was a man of unusually many parts. A born writer who nonetheless took decades to write his first book, Roger was also variously - and sometimes simultaneously - maverick ad-man, seller of stripped pine furniture on the Portobello Roa...

Born in Germany to aristocratic parents, Sybille Bedford's (1911-2006) life contained all the grand feeling and seismic event of the 20th century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death, as well as the need to write and rescue something from this wreckage. Openly gay, Bedford once s...