New Releases by Selina Hastings

A beautifully illustrated children's Bible for families to enjoy together. This collection of influential and inspiring stories from the Old and New Testaments helps children to learn and interpret the messages and meanings of the Bible. The classic stories are retold in simple, accessible language for children, while beautiful illustrations bring the words to life. Children aged 9-12 years will love the colorful photographs and illustrations of key people and places, alongside geographical maps of locations in the Bible, to provide fresh insight and aid understanding. The Children’s Pocket Bible also introduces younger readers to sacred sites of religious significance, from the peak of Mount Sinai to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. This family favourite pocket Bible features: - The many stories, events, people, and places in one comprehensive reference book - Clear, accessible text, including helpful quotations, for understanding and enjoyment of the Bible stories - Beautiful illustrations and photography, alongside stories and quotations, to engage a younger audience - Material prepared in full consultation with education experts, scholars, and religious advisers This comprehensive guide to the Bible for kids covers major events to learn about in detail, including the creation, the nativity, and the resurrection. You’ll also find important quotations from the King James Bible, with useful references to chapter and verse.

The first biography of the universally acclaimed British writer, Sybille Bedford, by the celebrated author of books about Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Passionate, liberated, fiercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journalist, the author of ten books, including a biography of Aldous Huxley, and four novels, all of which fictionalized her extraordinary life. Born in Berlin, she grew up in Baden, first with her distant, aristocratic father, and then in France with her intellectual, narcissistic, morphine-addicted mother and her lover. She was a child with a German Jewish background who survived two world wars and went on to spend her adult life in exile in France, Italy, New York, and Los Angeles, before finally settling in England. Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. Aldous Huxley became a mentor, and Martha Gellhorn encouraged her to write her first novel, A Legacy; in 1989, her novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the 1960s, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly 100 trials, including those of Auschwitz officials accused of Nazi war crimes and Jack Ruby, on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Brenda Wineapple has called Bedford "one of the finest stylists of the 20th century, bar none." In this major biography, Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the fierce intelligence, wit, curiosity, and compassion of the woman and the writer in all the richness of her character and achievements.

In The Red Earl Selina Hastings tells the extraordinary story of her father, Jack Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon. In 1925, Hastings infuriated his ultra-conservative parents by turning his back on centuries of tradition to make a scandalous run-away marriage. With his beautiful Italian wife he then left England for the other side of the world, further enraging his family by determining on a career as a painter. The couple settled first in Australia, then on the island of Moorea in the South Pacific. Here, they led an idyllic existence until a bizarre accident forced them to leave the tropics forever. En route back to England, they stopped for a year in California, where Hastings continued to paint while enjoying a glamorous social life with actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. While in San Francisco, Hastings met the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and persuaded him to take him on as an assistant. For the next nearly four years he lived at close quarters with Rivera and with his wife, Frida Kahlo, first in San Francisco, then Detroit, and finally Mexico City. When eventually Hastings returned home it was to be faced with fighting on all fronts: in Spain during the Civil War; in England with his parents; and lastly with his wife, determined to keep him locked into a marriage from which by now he was desperate to escape. This enthralling story, superbly well written, not only gives a new perspective on two of the 20th-century's greatest artists, Rivera and Kahlo, but also reveals in fascinating detail the private life of an aristocratic family of 100 years ago.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd is one of the most celebrated landscape designers in the world. Leading biographer Selina Hastings describes the creation and development of Arabella’s own garden at Gresgarth - the sum of her life’s work and one of the most beautiful gardens in Britain. Working closely with Arabella, she looks at different sections of the garden in turn, how each was planned and planted. The narrative will be interspersed with details of Arabella’s life and career, much of it in her own words, with particular emphasis on how she drew on her Italian background to enrich the very different resources to be found in Lancashire. This intriguing contrast will be further explored in the inclusion of a number of recipes, using ingredients grown in the garden.

The life of Rosamond Lehmann was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. Her first novel, the shocking Dusty Answer, became wildly successful launching her career as a novelist and, just as her novels depicted the tempestuous lives of her heroines, Rosamond's personal life would be full of heartbreaking affairs and lost loves. Escaping from a disastrous early marriage Rosamond moved right into the heart of Bloomsbury society with Wogan Philipps. Later on she would embark on the most important love affair of her life, with the poet Cecil Day Lewis; nine years later he abandoned her for a young actress - a betrayal from which she would never recover. Selina Hastings masterfully creates a portrait of a woman whose dramatic life, work and relationships criss-crossed the cultural, literary and political landscape of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

He was a brilliant teller of tales, one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century, and at one time the most famous writer in the world, yet W. Somerset Maugham’s own true story has never been fully told. At last, the fascinating truth is revealed in a landmark biography by the award-winning writer Selina Hastings. Granted unprecedented access to Maugham’s personal correspondence and to newly uncovered interviews with his only child, Hastings portrays the secret loves, betrayals, integrity, and passion that inspired Maugham to create such classics as The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage. Hastings vividly presents Maugham’s lonely childhood spent with unloving relatives after the death of his parents, a trauma that resulted in shyness, a stammer, and for the rest of his life an urgent need for physical tenderness. Here, too, are his adult triumphs on the stage and page, works that allowed him a glittering social life in which he befriended and sometimes fell out with such luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Charlie Chaplin, D. H. Lawrence, and Winston Churchill. The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham portrays in full for the first time Maugham’s disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome, a manipulative society woman of dubious morality who trapped Maugham with a pregnancy and an attempted suicide. Hastings also explores Maugham’s many affairs with men, including his great love, Gerald Haxton, an alcoholic charmer and a cad. Maugham’s courageous work in secret intelligence during two world wars is described in fascinating detail—experiences that provided the inspiration for the groundbreaking Ashenden stories. From the West End to Broadway, from China to the South Pacific, Maugham’s restless and remarkably productive life is thrillingly recounted as Hastings uncovers the real stories behind such classics as “Rain,” The Painted Veil, Cakes & Ale, and other well-known tales. An epic biography of a hugely talented and hugely conflicted man, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is the definitive account of Maugham’s extraordinary life.

Granted unprecedented access to Maugham's personal correspondence and to newly uncovered interviews with his only child, Hastings portrays the secret loves, betrayals, integrity, and passion that inspired Maugham to create such classics as The Razor's Edge.

In this magnificently illustrated edition, all the best-loved stories of the Bible are retold for young readers by Selina Hastings. Her fluent, lively style reflects the character & poetry of the original Bible, while color photographs & vivid & finely detailed illustrations by Eric Thomas bring to life the people & places referred to in the stories. To help explain the stories & set them in their historical & geographical context, background information is included, together with photographs & maps of places mentioned in the Bible. This volume has been carefully prepared with a panel of religious consultants, historians, educators, & scholars. Foreword by Rabbi Joseph Potasnik.

This biography of Evelyn Waugh traces the career of a writer who, though respected, was always controversial and undoubtedly eccentric. In particular it focuses on his difficult relationship with his father, his homosexual affair at Oxford, his unhappy first marriage to Evelyn Gardner, his years of sexual adventure before his second marriage, his attitude to the Church, his conversion to Catholicism, his disastrous relationship with the military, and his enduring but difficult friendships with his three favourite women - Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming.

"What would you do", Grandfather asks Peter, "if one day a wolf came out of the forest?" Full-color illustrations.