Mary Griffiths' knowledge of war began with her parents' stories and a suitcase full of black and white photographs taken by her father during his service in the Second World War. War remained family history and background news until she began to rec...

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Ticks and Crosses" covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios...

In 1822 William Hazlitt, forty-four years old and married, was both tormented and enchanted by Sarah Walker, his landlady's nineteen-year-old daughter. "Liber Amoris" is the chronicle of that obsession, an extraordinary fragment of Romantic autobiogr...

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English prose writers, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, each one sparkling with urbane wit and gossip. Characters from the Regency spring to life: W...

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a central figure in the artistic life of mid-nineteenth-century Paris and London. His distinct aesthetic, with its emphasis on appreciating a work of art as an arrangement of colours, lines and shapes, can be se...

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) has long been recognised as one of Britain's greatest film directors. His studies of national life, and particularly his three war time films "Listen to Britain", "Fires Were Started", and "A Diary for Timothy", invaluab...

Whether sharing his anxieties about his writing, consoling bereaved friends, complaining about the meanness of a patron or defending himself against malicious gossip, John Donne reveals himself in his letters with a directness that can be found nowhe...

"The Creation of the World" is the autobiography of one of Portugal's most celebrated modern writers, Miguel Torga. Six days comprise "The Creation", published in English in its entirety for the first time. We begin with Torga's childhood in the wi...

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) loved his country. He also had an insatiable hunger for experience. When World War II began he enlisted: to fight, and to read history from within its turbulence. As with the poets of the First World War, his art was tried,...

Quarried from newspapers and journals, in which Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M.Grieve) wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, this collection – the second – reflects his enduring interests and eclectic range of concerns. On the centenary of his birth in 1992,...