Biography

A memoir about a hilariously over-protective mother filled with many (of the thousands) of nutty notes she's sent over the past 30 years.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the 26 British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. ... read more

Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide in 1971, at the age of forty-eight, the presumed chaos and darkness of her own inner life became, for many viewers, inextricable from her work. In the spirit of Janet Malcolm's classic examination of Sylvia Plath, "The Silent Woman, " William Todd Schultz's "An Emergency in Slow Motion" reveals the cre... read more

Bad news . . . . . . for anyone who thought Carrie Fisher had finally stopped talking about herself: Sorry, but after all of her seemingly endless blathering on about her nose-bleedhigh- class problems, it appears she has yet another brand-new problem to overshare about (though don't expect to relate to it). This time, the electro-convulsive shock therapy she's been regularly undergoing is threatening to wipe out (what's left of) her memory. But get ready for a shock of your own. Not only doesn't she mind paying the second ... read more

Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, played by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind. His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang. Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer during the tumultuous Gilded Age in order to champion poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts against big business, Jim Crow, and corrupt officials. He became famous defending union leader Eugene Debs in ... read more

Deborah Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (so memorably fictionalised by her sister Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics (while not being at all political herself), finally setting the record straight. Throughout the book she writes brilliantly about the country and her deep attachment to it and those who live and work in it. As Duche... read more

English professor and motorcycle enthusiast Ted Bishop is taking one last ride before fall term when his bike vibrates out of control and he is flung into a ditch, breaking his back and collapsing his lungs. With limited mobility, Ted finally has time to savour the reading experience. He begins writing about his crash, realizing that two worlds had come together when his head hit the pavement. The more he thinks about it, the more it seems that archival work is the inverse, not the opposite, of motorcycling. Ultimately, what surrou... read more

Francoise Gilot was a young painter in Pasis when she first met Picasso - he was sixty-two and she was twenty-one. During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. LIFE WITH PICASSO, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her tur... read more

Born from a secret liaison between a British mother and an Icelandic father, Kari Gislason was the subject of a promise - a promise elicited from his father to not reveal his identity. The Icelandic city of Reykjavik, where Kari was born, was also home to his father and his father's wife and four children - none of whom knew of Kari's existence. Moving regularly between Iceland and Australia, he grew up aware of his father's identity, but understanding that it was the subject of a secret pact between his parents. At the age of 27, ... read more

From stalking and eventually meeting her Young Talent Time idol when she was twelve, to dalliances with streetwalkers, to a mildly perverse obsession with Bob Ellis, there is nothing Marieke Hardy won't write about. Voyeuristic, painful, hilarious and heartfelt, You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead reveals the acerbic wit, unflinching gaze and razor-sharp insight of a writer at the height of her powers - or the unhinged fantasies of a dangerous mind with not enough to do.

No Description

In this groundbreaking biography, based on more than 10,000 hitherto unavailable letters and diary entries, Niall Ferguson returns to his roots as a financial historian to tell the story of the extraordinary Siegmund Warburg. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Warburg rose to become the dominant figure in the post-war City of London and one of the architects of European financial integration. Seared by events in the 1930s, when the long-established Warburg bank was first almost destroyed by the Depression and then 'Aryanized' by the ... read more

The love affair between Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most famous stories from the ancient world and has been depicted in countless novels, plays and films. As one of the three men in control of the Roman Empire, Antony was perhaps the most powerful man of his day. And Cleopatra, who had already been Julius Caesar's lover, was the beautiful queen of Egypt, Rome's most important province. The clash of cultures, the power politics, and the personal passion have proven irresistible to storytellers. But in the course of this story... read more

The mid-seventies � and satin baggies and chunky platforms reigned supreme. Jethro Tull did battle with glam-rock for the airwaves. At an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave fell wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So began a relationship that was to last for 15 years, a love affair that weathered disapproval, separation and, ultimately death. Holding the Man recreates that relationship. With honesty and insight it explores the highs a... read more

From a psychiatrist who has spent the past thirty years listening to other people's most intimate secrets and troubles - an eloquent, incisive, and deeply perceptive book about the things we all grapple with as we strive to make the most of the life we have left. After service in Vietnam as a surgeon, Dr Gordon Livingston returned to the US and began work as a psychiatrist. In that capacity, he has listened to people talk about their lives what works, what doesn't and the limitless ways (most of them self-inflicted) that we have... read more

In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires' house in Ireland. This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of sporadic but highly entertaining letters. There can rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader), darts from subject to subject while Padd... read more

The first serious yet sympathetic biography by a woman of the Duchess of Windsor, Mrs Simpson.
This will be the first serious yet sympathetic book by a female biographer to explain the story of how an American divorcee became a hate figure for allegedly ensnaring a British King from his throne. It focuses on the core conflict of her life in the 1930s, with particular reference to her impoverished American childhood as a motivation for her ambition. 'That woman', so called by her sister-in-law the new Queen Elizabeth, was born... read more

He is one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court - but from early childhood Andre Agassi hated the game. Coaxed to swing a racket while still in the crib, forced to hit hundreds of balls a day while still in grade school, Agassi resented the constant pressure even as he drove himself to become a prodigy, an inner conflict that would define him. Now, in his beautiful, haunting autobiography, Agassi tells the story of a life framed by such conflicts. Agassi makes us fe... read more

No Description

An unforgettable portrait of the Austro-Hungarian author of The Radetzky March, this biography in letters - selected here for the first time by Michael Hofmann - is classic European literature at its finest.

Occasionally a collection of letters appears that is so extraordinary in its biographical details and emotional resonance that the work becomes a classic of literature in its own right: the letters, for example, of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway or Saul Bellow. Such is the case of the legendary Austro-Hungarian ... read more