"A superb biography of an exceptional novelist" (New Yorker). Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Index; photographs.

    At the time few details of his crimes were made known. By his own confession he was a Soviet spy and rumours later circulated that his actions had endangered British agents, but the reasons for such a severe punishment were never revealed. To the public, Blake was simply the greatest traitor of the Cold War. Yet, as Roger Hermiston reveals in this thrilling new biography, his story touches not only the depths of treachery, but also the heights of heroism. In WWII the teenage Blake performed sterling deeds for the Dutch resistance, before making a dramatic bid for freedom across Nazi-occupied Europe. Later recruited by British Intelligence, he quickly earned an exemplary reputation and was entrusted with building up the Service's networks behind the Iron Curtain. And, following a posting to Seoul, he also suffered for his adopted country, when captured by North Korean soldiers at the height of their brutal war with the South. By the time of his release in 1953, Blake was a hero, one of the Service's brightest and best officers. But unbeknownst to SIS they were harbouring a mole. Week after week, year after year, Blake was assiduously gathering all the important documents he could lay his hands on and passing them to the KGB. Drawing on hitherto unpublished records from his trial, new revelations about his dramatic jailbreak from Wormwood Scrubs, and original interviews with former spies, friends and the man himself, 'The Greatest Traitor' sheds new light on this most complex of characters and presents a fascinating shadow history of the Cold War.

    The author, who draws on thousands of letters Sayers wrote, reveals her to be a complex woman. Sayers was a very private person who even hid the existence of an illegitimate child from her closest friends. She was also someone to whom faith was central and wrote many theological books as well as the famous detective novels. Her radio play on the life of Christ, "The Man Born to be King", caused a furore when it was first broadcast and went on to win acclaim. She was linked with the Inklings - the group of writers which included C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien and others.

    She is the mermaid of whom poet Robert Lowell writes in The Dolphin (and he was clutching her portrait when he died). She was Lady Caroline Blackwood, legendarily witty and alluring but also a legendary drunk. Raised an heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood (1931-1996) moved easily among the aristocracy, the bohemians of postwar England and the liberal intelligentsia of 1960s New York. She has been called a muse to genius-though her marriages to Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz, and Robert Lowell were as troubled as they were inspiring-and she was an author herself, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1977. In this first biography of Blackwood, Nancy Schoenberger deftly paints a complex woman who was captivating to her dying day.

    She remains the head of state of the United Kingdom, and a group of 16 nations including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand call her queen, and she is the head of the British Commonwealth which includes another 37 countries, including India and South Africa. Throughout her life, she has enjoyed much happiness including a long and happy marriage to Prince Philip, four children, and Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees. Her reign has also been marked by much sadness, including the failed marriages of three of her children, the deaths of close family members and friends, and the markedly difficult death of Princess Diana, which took a toll on both the Royal Family and the nation.Now Life, in a new special edition, takes a nuanced and thoughtful look at the reign of Elizabeth at 90 and what her over-63 years on the throne have meant for her subjects and the world at large, including her early life, the years of World War Ii, her marriage and family, life ruling Great Britain, Windsor family values and much more.With dozens of stunning photos, stories, and analysis, Queen Elizabeth at 90 is a keepsake of both a life well-lived and an historical time on the throne, as well as a captivating collection for any royal watcher.

    Selina Hastings, who was granted unrestricted access to his personal papers by Waugh's family, has uncovered a wealth of new material in her eight years of research for this volume. Letters, diaries, and family photographs shed new light on Waugh's childhood, his affairs at Oxford, his ill-fated first marriage and subsequent romantic adventures, his World War II military service, and his enduring but thorny friendships with such notable figures as Diana Cooper, Ann Fleming, and Nancy Mitford. Perceptive, fascinating, by turns hilarious and tragic, Hastings's portrait gives us Waugh's glittering social life at Oxford, where he was a friend of Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, and Alastair Graham, the inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh then followed a diverse career as schoolmaster, world traveler, war co

    Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted Shadow opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot’s poetry.Vivienne longed to tell her whole story; she wrote in her diary: “You who in later years will read these very words of mine will be able to trace a true history of this epoch.” She believed (as did Virginia Woolf) that she was Eliot’s muse, the woman through whom he transmuted life into art. Yet Vivienne knew the secrets of his separate and secret life — which contributed to her own deepening hysteria, drug addiction, and final abandonment: the tragedy of a marriage that paired a repressed yet sensual man with an extroverted woman who longed for a full sexual relationship with her husband.Out of this emotional turbulence came one of the most important English poems of the twentieth century: The Waste Land, which Carole Seymour-Jones convincingly shows cannot be fully understood without reference to the relationship of the poet and his first wife. Drawing on papers both privately owned and in university library archives and, most importantly, on Vivienne Eliot’s own journals left to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carole Seymour-Jones uses many hitherto unpublished sources and opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot’s poetry.

    In the first comprehensive biography of John Fante, one of the great lost souls of twentieth-century literature, Stephen Cooper untangles the enigma of an authentic American original. By turns savage and poetic, violent and full of love, such underground novels as The Road to Los Angeles; Ask the Dust; and Wait Until Spring, Bandini simultaneously reveal and disguise their author. Born in 1909 to poor Italian American parents in Colorado, Fante ventured west in 1930 to become a writer. Eventually settling in Los Angeles' faded downtown area of Bunker Hill, Fante starved between menial Depression-era jobs while writing story after story about the world he knew-full of poverty, hatred, and the madness of love. His first stories were published by H. L. Mencken in the American Mercury, but Fante also made a career in Hollywood working with the likes of Orson Welles and Darryl F. Zanuck. By the time of his death, though, he was nearly forgotten. Fortunately, readers such as Charles Bukowski began to recognize that Ask the Dust stands alongside the best work of Nathanael West and Sherwood Anderson. This exacting and vivid biography will help secure Fante's place in the American literary pantheon.

    His marriage to the poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life, and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963. Many people have held his adultery responsible for Plath's death; in this insightful book, Elaine Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation, and throws a sad new light on his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill, who also killed herself along with their young daughter.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews with childhood friends, fellow undergraduates, poets, and critics, Feinstein gives a portrait of a large-spirited, magnetic personality intrigued by the forms of magical experience that preoccupied Shakespeare and Yeats, but who was nevertheless a down-to-earth Yorkshire man, whose poetic vision encompassed not only his love of the natural world but also all the evidence of human brutality in the past century.

    As the book opens, in 1963, South Africa is in crisis and the white state is under siege. On August 15, the dreaded security police swoop down on Griggs Bookstore—Durban’s finest literary haunt and a place where African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party comrades frequented to receive or deliver messages and money to advance the cause of the struggle—to arrest Eleanor Kasrils, the manager’s daughter. The police threaten to "break her or hang her" if she does not lead them to her lover, Ronnie Kasrils, who is wanted on suspicion of sabotage for setting off explosions and toppling electricity poles. Though she comes under intense pressure during interrogation, Eleanor has her own secret to conceal. She has been acting as a clandestine agent for the underground ANC, utilizing the books as a means to deliver documents: "If the contact was delivering a document it was handed to her with a book for purchase. Similarly if she had a document that the courier was collecting, it would be hidden within the pages of a book already packaged and handed over as a purchase." Always, the transfer of secret documents could only take place once the recipient whispered a code: "Well, let me take both books." In order to protect her handlers and Ronnie at all costs, she astutely convinces the police that she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and, still a prisoner, is sent off to a mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg for assessment. It is here that she plots her escape and—pursued by the police—flees with Ronnie into exile.

    This selection of letters does full justice to these splendid attribute's " Phillip Toynbee.

    She was a woman who made a vivid impression on those she met—she was portrayed (or caricatured), for example, in novels by Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Hopelessly in love with the noted writer Lytton Strachey, she achieved notoriety by killing herself shortly after his death. A talented painter, living a bohemian life, Carrington was torn by conflicts as an artist and a woman, including the shrewd and inquisitive Bloomsbury group. Carrington’s paintings, however, reveal much of her remarkable and original cast of mind, and since her death her reputation as an artist has grown steadily. Her work is new represented in major collections worldwide.

    The real life and faith journey of Loretta Young -- her strong devotion to her Catholic faith and her passion for helping others in need.

    This book tells her story.

    Often dismissed as a social climber who faded into the woodwork after she divorced Jackie's father-the dashing, disreputable "Black Jack" Bouvier-and married the rich Hugh D. Auchincloss, Janet not only played a pivotal part in Jackie's own wedding to JFK, but often served as a stand-in for Jackie during the White House years, and helped her cope with John and Caroline after the assassination.The only book to explore this fascinating mother-daughter relationship, Janet & Jackie is filled with stories that shed new light on the personal life of an American icon.