Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leave the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham's sympathetic eye, Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in humans' lives it sometimes demands.

    Barbellion has an extraordinary lust for life. As Zeppelins loomed above the streets of South Kensington, the humour and beauty he found in the world around him - in music, friendship, nature and love - deepens not just the tragedy of his own life, but the millions of lives lost during the First World War.

    He is best remembered today for his ghost stories in the classic Victorian Yuletide vein.

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    In a series of luminous sketches, Beerbohm captures the likes of Enoch Soames, only begetter of the neglected poetic masterwork Fungoids; Maltby and Braxton, two fashionable novelists caught in a bitter rivalry; and "Savonarola" Brown, author of a truly incredible tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance. One of the masterpieces of modern humorous writing, Seven Men is also a shrewdly perceptive, heartfelt homage to the wonderfully eccentric character of a bygone age.

    But her favourite among her books was Consequences (1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets everything wrong; she refuses to marry the only young man who ‘offers’ and believes there is nothing left for her but to enter a convent. But that is not quite the end of her tragic story. Nor was it for EM Delafield, who also entered a convent for a year; but in her case she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD in an army hospital, ‘which was emancipation of the most delirious kind. It was occupation, it was self-respect.’Like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, written at the same time, Consequences is a scream of horror against Victorian values; however, its ironic tone cannot disguise EM Delafield’s deeply compassionate and feminist stance.

    In 1915, he published The Elixir of Life, his only full length novel apart from the Swallows & Amazons series. He published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales the following year. After the start of WWI, he became a foreign correspondent & covered the war on the Eastern Front for The Daily News. He also covered the Russian Revolutions of 1917, coming to sympathise with the Bolsheviks & becoming close to a number of its leaders, including Lenin & Trotsky. He met the woman who'd become his 2nd wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who at that time was Trotsky's personal secretary. He provided some information to MI5, which gave him the code name S.76 in their files. Bruce Lockhart said in his memoirs: "Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog, & a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks & frequently brought us information of the greatest value." In 10/19 he met Rex Leeper of the Foreign Office's Political Intelligence Dep't, who threatened to reveal this unless he privately submitted his articles & public speaking engagements for approval. Ransome's response was indignant. MI5 suspected he was a threat because of his opposition to the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War. On one of his visits to the UK, authorities searched him & threatened arrest. In 10/19, as he was returning to Moscow on behalf of The Manchester Guardian, the Estonian foreign minister Ants Piip entrusted him to deliver a secret armistice proposal to the Bolsheviks. At that time the Estonians were fighting their War of Independence alongside White counterrevolutionary forces. After crossing the battlelines on foot, he passed the message, which to preserve secrecy had not been written down & depended for its authority only on the high regard in which he was held in both countries, to diplomat Maxim Litvinov in Moscow. To deliver the reply, which accepted Piip's conditions for peace, he had to return by the same means, but this time he had Evgenia with him. Estonia withdrew from the conflict & they settled in the capital.