This collection brings together the best of C.S. Lewis’s letters, many published for the first time. Arranged in chronological order, this final volume covers the years 1950 – the year ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ was published – through to Lewis’s untimely death in 1963.C.S. Lewis was a most prolific letter-writer and his personal correspondence reveals much of his private life, reflect…
Matthew Dennison creates a revealing portrait of the brave and charismatic Vita, in the first biography of her to be written for thirty years.Vita Sackville-West was a woman who defied categorisation. She was the dispossessed girl whose lonely childhood at Knole inspired enduring feats of imagination, the celebrated author and poet, the adored and affectionate wife whose marriage included passiona…
Nine-year-old Archie and his five-year-old sister, Bobbi, are taken into emergency police protective custody after an incident of domestic violence at their family home.Rosie collects the children from their out-of-hours foster carer on New Year’s Day and instantly recognises Archie from a domestic violence workshop she helped with. Rosie remembers that when asked what he enjoyed most about the co…
The story of a fascinating man who connected the great politicians, artists and thinkers at the height of British global power and influence.A famed aesthete, politician and patron of the arts, Philip Sassoon lived in a world of English elegance and oriental flair. Gathering a social set that would provide inspiration for Brideshead Revisited, Sassoon gave parties at which Winston Churchill argued…
Justine Picardie has spent the last decade puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, attempting to peel away the accretions of romance and lies. In this critically acclaimed, bestselling biography she shares the history of the incredible woman who created the way we look now.Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor – she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contem…
Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes’s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain’s greatest poets.‘Coleridge: Early Visions’ is the first part of Holmes’s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent sc…
The new face of risky drinking is female. The problem: a global epidemic of bingeing. The solution: a brave new approach to female recovery.This is my story, and it's particular. But I am not alone. Drinking problems challenge a growing number of women.The new reality: binge drinking is increasing among young adults – and women are largely responsible for this trend. Women’s buying power has been …
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2018 Bestselling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson. Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mecha…
NUMBER 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERNo one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life.Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict and they make sure you learn t…
‘The word “mesmerising” is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove’ Financial Times‘Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist…’Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally’s childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God – their leader…
From the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’, a wry, shocking and beautiful memoir of childhood, ghosts, hauntings, illness and family.At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her ha…
Agatha Christie’s ‘most absorbing mystery’ – her own autobiography.Over the three decades since her death on 12 January 1976, many of Agatha Christie’s readers and reviewers have maintained that her most compelling book is probably still her least well-known. Her candid Autobiography, written mainly in the 1960s, modestly ignores the fact that Agatha had become the best-selling novelist in history…
It’s late on Friday night when Casey’s mobile starts to ring. She is expecting it to be her daughter Riley. But it isn’t Riley. It’s a woman from the Emergency Duty Team. So begins Casey and Mike’s latest fostering challenge – a fifteen-year-old girl called Keeley who’s run away from her long-term foster home 25 miles away.The Jonathan Ross Show has just started when Casey gets the call. She think…
It’s late on Friday night when Casey’s mobile starts to ring. She is expecting it to be her daughter Riley. But it isn’t Riley. It’s a woman from the Emergency Duty Team. So begins Casey and Mike’s latest fostering challenge – a fifteen-year-old girl called Keeley who’s run away from her long-term foster home 25 miles away.The Jonathan Ross Show has just started when Casey gets the call. She think…
It’s late on Friday night when Casey’s mobile starts to ring. She is expecting it to be her daughter Riley. But it isn’t Riley. It’s a woman from the Emergency Duty Team. So begins Casey and Mike’s latest fostering challenge – a fifteen-year-old girl called Keeley who’s run away from her long-term foster home 25 miles away.The Jonathan Ross Show has just started when Casey gets the call. She think…