Biography: Literary

At the age of seventeen, Rebecca Mead read Middlemarch for the first time, and has read it again every five years since, each time interpreting and...

A renowned scholar of the English language, Tolkien is today celebrated as the father of the high fantasy genre. Drawing on his knowledge of langua...

Over the last twenty years, critical discussion of Thomas Mann has highlighted the role of his homosexuality for his creative work. This not only i...

The story of the group of extraordinary eighteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern  Selected by New Y...

'A woman's defiant fight to write.' ObserverBeing categorised as black and female does not constrain my writing. Writing assures me that I am more ...

''Hitchings is extremely good at unravelling Johnsons most bullish assertions . . . lucid and empathetic, scholarly but lively. A model Johnsonian,...

The Forging of a Rebel is an unsurpassed account of Spanish history and society from early in the twentieth century through the cataclysmic events ...

Brenda Chamberlain lived a life of artistic engagement with the world. She published a compelling body of literary work and held solo exhibitions i...

Sometimes called the Czech Bukowski, and more widely known by the epithet Magor (which translates roughly to fool or madman), Ivan Jirous was one o...

'Both extremely funny and deeply sad, The Writing School examines how and why we tell our own stories. It's beautifully written and structured, co...

Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world.'The bes...