Biography

*A FOYLES TOP TEN READ FOR APRIL*`A superb portrait of the complex imprint the countryside makes on the life of the mind . A treasure' Doireann N� Ghr�ofaIn Rural Hours, Harriet Baker tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved...

`A wonderful book . Holmes sublimely illuminates Sylvia's extraordinary life' The Times`A masterpiece' Vanessa Redgrave _______________Born into one of Britain's most famous activist families, Sylvia Pankhurst was a natural rebel. A free spirit and radical visionary, history placed her in the shadow of her...

The long-awaited autobiography of the archetypal kitchen bad boy - Marco Pierre WhiteWhen Marco Pierre White's mother died when he was just six years old, it transformed his life. Soon, his father was urging him to earn his own keep and by sixteen he...

WINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDWINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson'Dazzling' Literary Review 'Brilliant' Sunday Express'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist'A superb biography' The Economist'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday Alexander von Humboldt...

In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans set out on assignement for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 Let Us Now Praise...

The inspirational memoir from the star of OUR WELSH CHAPEL DREAM and THE GREAT POTTERY THROWDOWN Readers LOVE Boy In A China Shop: 'What a brilliant book. Keith is so charming and funny and my goodness what a hard worker. I loved it. Get...

Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have together sold over 40 million copies. Even now, he continues to...

Born in a rural Kenyan village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most African girls then were uneducated. In her remarkable and inspiring autobiography, she tells of her studies with Catholic missionaries,...

A FAMILY STORY AND THE TALE OF A NATION. Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the...

It is so good, after so many years of public indifference, even hostility towards Vincent and his work, to feel towards the end of my life that the battle is won.' JO VAN GOGH-BONGER TO GUSTAVE COQUIOT, 1922`It is a sacrifice for the sake...

A moving portrait of the landscape that shaped the life of Laurie Lee, the beloved author of Cider With Rosie 'Before I left the valley I thought everywhere was like this. Then I went away for 40 years and when I came back I...

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 this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence - where...

Fascinating' The Times'Blakeian in its singularity' New Statesman'A wonderful adventure' Irish Times'Rich, complex and original' Tom Holland'A crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction' Times Literary SupplementPoet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius....

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE ONDAATJE PRIZE'The best book I read last year by a mile. . . so beautifully written that anyone would be hooked' Laura Hackett, Sunday Times, Best Summer Books'Wonderfully funny and poignant. . . a tale of family...

Riveting; as fresh and relevant today as it was almost 50 years ago. The words fire off the page with humour, anger and eloquence' GuardianA powerful and commanding account of the life of trailblazing political activist Angela DavisEdited by Toni Morrison and first published...

The definitive modern biography of the great slave leader, military genius and revolutionary hero Toussaint LouvertureThe Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the...

Barbara Hepworth is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, yet she has been the subject of relatively few monographs in comparison to her male counterparts. This biography moves beyond the traditional narratives of modernism, truth to materials, and the landscape...

**WINNER OF THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD**Edmund de Waal uncovers the history of a family through a turbulent century through 264 objects. 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection...

Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old...

Acclaimed historian and broadcaster Helen Castor tells the story of Joan of Arc as you have never read it before. 'Popular history at its best.' Daily TelegraphHelen Castor brings us afresh a gripping life of Joan of Arc. Instead of the icon, she gives...

The beautifully illustrated and authoritative biography of Frida Kahlo'Frida will hold its place as the first comprehensive biography of this most visceral of artists' Observer'Mesmerizing' TimeFrida is the story of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary women, the painter Frida Kahlo. Born near...

OVER 13M COPIES SOLD - THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING PHENOMENON - NUMBER 8 ON SUNDAY TIMES BEST OF THE BESTSELLER LIST Few books have had such an impact as Wild Swans: a popular bestseller which has sold more than 13 million copies and a critically...

AS HEARD ON DESERT ISLAND DISCSAS SEEN ON THE CHANGEMAKERS, a Paramount+ docuseries profiling activists fighting for changeA WATERSTONES PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR'A riveting story of loss, exile, and rebirth.' KHALED HOSSEINI, author of The Kite Runner'One of the most incredible life stories you...

A�NEW YORK TIMES�BESTSELLER *SELECTED AS ONE OF��BARACK�OBAMA'S�FAVOURITE BOOKS OF�2023*Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's�King is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. - and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. � In this...

Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a...

A new selection of post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gough's letters, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh put a human face on one of the most haunting figures in modern Western culture. In this Penguin Classics edition, the letters are selected and edited by Ronald...

Manet, Monet, Pissarro, C�zanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, astonishing sums are paid today for the works of these artists. Their dazzling pictures are familiar - but how well does the...

A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. 'Breathtakingly good . . . Exiles is completely sui generis.'EDMUND DE WAAL'Atkins...

Originally published in 1979, All Around the Year is a diary following a year at Parsonage Farm, a mixed farm in Devon, close to Dartmoor. The book documented a way of life unchanged for centuries, but which was already remote to most people. In...

An autobiographical work that describes firsthand the great tectonic shifts in English society following the First World War, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That is a matchless evocation of the Great War's haunting legacy, published in Penguin Modern Classics. In 1929 Robert Graves went...

Truly wonderful... Anna Funder has written another brilliant human portrait.' - Claire Tomalin A BLAZING, GENRE-BENDING MASTERPIECE FROM ONE OF THE MOST INVENTIVE WRITERS OF OUR TIMELooking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero...

Sir Horace Jones (1819-1887) was the architect of Tower Bridge, designed in collaboration with John Wolfe Barry. But while some of his surviving buildings are world famous, Jones himself is relatively unknown. For over twenty years he was architect and surveyor to the City...

BEST BOOK OF 2023 ACCORDING TO THE NEWSTATESMAN AND OBSERVERThe definitive biography of beloved author, Roger DeakinRoger 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,...

By: Amartya, FBA SenBinding: Paperback / softbackThe extraordinary early life in India and England of one of the world's leading public intellectualsWhere is 'home'? For Amartya Sen, home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, the little university town of Santiniketan, where...

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by A.S.Byatt as 'one of the finest biographies ever published', this is Fiona MacCarthy's magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. 'Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.' Independent'Wonderfully ambitious...

When Elspeth Huxley's pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they...

**WINNER OF PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY****WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD (Nonfiction)**Shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown AwardFinalist, LA Times Book PrizeA landmark biography of one of the twentieth century's most compelling figures, rewriting much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer...

With over fifty patents to his name and innumerable awards and accolades, James Lovelock was a distinguished and original thinker, widely recognized by the international scientific community. In this inspiring book, republished in the year of his 100th birthday, Lovelock tells his life story,...

You haunt me everywhere.' So wrote Edward Burne-Jones to Frances Graham, his muse for the last 25 triumphant years of his life: 'I haven't a corner of my life or my thoughts where you are not'. He drew her obsessively, included her in some...