Biography: Literary

This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his be...

From the author of Mrs Engels and The Sisters Mao, an intimate family memoir about filial love and its limits, separation, and loss. Gavin is spend...

'The master storyteller of our times' Hillary Rodham Clinton'The whole story of his truly astonishing life' Bob Woodward'The book was damn near add...

One of my favourite living writers: intelligent, lucid and, most impressive of all, funny - Jonathan CoeIf were talking agoraphobia, were talking b...

I took off my wedding ring - a gold band with half a line of 'Morning Song' by Sylvia Plath etched inside - and for weeks afterwards, my thumb woul...

An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveller and unrivalled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas...

Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two...

Goncharov was the leading Russian writer of the 1850s and, as the author of The Same Old Story, was regarded as the real heir to Nikolai Gogol. But...

An absolute gem . . . I was delightfully lost by the river throughout Paul Whitehouse Marvellous . . . The Catch leaves both its writer and its rea...

Shortlisted for the Bread & Roses AwardAn Amazon Best Non-Fiction Book of The YearEssential reading The GuardianSharp and witty with moments o...

A quiet chat with Casanova turns into a catalogue of racy encounters set in 18th-century Venice and other cities and we can even ask questions! Yo...

Renowned for his endlessly quotable pronouncements, Oscar Wilde cut a dashing figure in late Victorian London until his tragic downfall resulting ...

Robert Crofts, a young Englishman, arrives in Australia in the 1950s, determined to inhabit the outback. After five years of life on the land, he m...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. His poems The Waste Land a...

In 1869, Gustave Flaubert published what he considered to be his masterwork novel, A Sentimental Education, which told a deeply human and deeply pe...

Henry David Thoreau is an American intellectual icon; what made him so was the decade between his graduation from Harvard and the years he spent in...

The story of the overcoat began with a chance meeting - between an obsessive book collector, Jacques Guérin, and his physician, Dr Robert Proust, b...