Biographies

A brand new edition of Arthur Koestler's gripping tale of arrest, imprisonment, and subsequent escape to London from Nazi-occupied France. Arthur Koestler is now an essential part of the English literary landscape both as political activist, controversialist and the author of Darkness at Noon. He stands beside George Orwell as one of the key writers of the twentieth century who embraced communism but would later turn against the partyand denounce the tragic distortions and abuses that had betrayed the great vision.

""I've never seen a Bob Dylan smile, except in photos or on the stage. Not the real thing."" Britta Lee Shain was a friend of Bob Dylan's until he asked her to join him on the road in the mid 1980s, at which point she became more than a friend. In this intimate and elliptical memoir of their time together, at home in Los Angeles and on tour with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, she offers a unique portrait of the romantic, earthbound, and poetic soul trapped in the role of Being Bob Dylan. ""If you were my woman, I'd be worth four times as much."" Entire libraries of books have been written about Dylan, but few--if any--offer any lasting insight into the man behind the shades. Until now. Written with the elegance of a poet and storytelling snap of a novelist, "Seeing The Real You At Last" is a poignant and tender romance that reveals Dylan's playfulness, his dark wit, his fears and struggles, his complex relationships with the men and women in his life, and, ultimately, his genius.

From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award.
The masterpiece of the 'I knew Susan' minigenre - A.O. Scott, The New York Times

A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America's most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute.

Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, "Who says we have to live like everyone else?"

Sontag's influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as "a natural mentor" who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, "someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer's vocation."

Published more than six years after Sontag's death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

A unique history of the Beats, in the words of the movement's most central member, Allen Ginsberg, based on a seminal series of his lecturesIn 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem 'Howl', Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation - partly to preserve his own memories of those years. The Best Minds of My Generation presents the best of these candid, intimate and illuminating lectures, revealing Kerouac, Burroughs and the rest of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors and fellow visionaries in a group who started a revolution. 'Marvellous ... spellbinding ... preserving intact the story of the literary movement Ginsberg led, promoted and never ceased to embody' The New York Times Book Review'An awesome exhaustive feat ... fascinatingly readable' Sunday Times'Astonishingly intimate ... Full of penetrating insight and fascinating literary gossip, the book is a major contribution to the core Beat canon ... situates the Beats in cultural history in a way that no other exploration of their work does' San Francisco Chronicle

The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians. Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people's history of the OED. She traces the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language, from the eccentric autodidacts to the family groups who made word-collection their passion. With generosity and brio, Ogilvie reveals, for the first time, the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world - and celebrates to sparkling effect the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People.

The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most eccentric in European history. The domineering paternal influence of Karl Wittgenstein left his eight children fraught by inner antagonisms and nervous tension. Three of his sons committed suicide; Paul, the fourth, became a world-famous concert pianist (using only his left hand), while Ludwig, the youngest, is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. In this dramatic historical and psychological epic, Alexander Waugh traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a family held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars.

A bravura performance, highly entertaining' Evening StandardThe Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a scientific man with a famously complicated private life. Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.

Thomas Cromwell, chief architect of the English Reformation, served as principal minister of Henry VIII from 1532 to 1540, the most tumultuous period in Henry's thirty-seven-year reign. Many of the momentous events of the 1530s are attributed to Cromwell's agency; the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries and the fall of Henry's second wife, the bewitching Anne Boleyn. Cromwell has been the subject of close and continuous attention for the last half-century, with positive appraisal of his work and achievements by historians. This new biography shows the true face of a Machiavellian Tudor statesman without equal.