Costa Book Awards-Biography Award

This book is about Ibsen and the definitive life he led as a founding genius of modern European theatre.

In this volume of autobiography Helen Corke, now aged 93, recalls her childhood and youth before the First World War. Her account has both a personal and a representative significance. Helen Corke has a gift for recounting the development of her own consciousness and her personality is revealed through this record of instinctive as well as of objective experience. Born into a Kentish middle-class family which was interested both in literature and trade, she was moved from town to country and back to a London suburb as her father's grocery business first prospered and then abruptly failed. Years of extreme poverty followed. For a gifted girl in such circumstances the only hope of further education was apprenticeship as an elementary school teacher. Helen took this course and records the grim (and grimy) conditions of primary education at the end of the nineteenth century.

A biography of Mary Curzon, first published in 1977 which charts her life from childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, through her presidence over the Viceregal Court of India as the wife of Viceroy George Curzon to death at the age of thirty-six.

John Grigg's four volume life of Lloyd George is one of the great political biographies. This, the third volume, in the author's own words 'will cover the five-year period from the beginning of 1912 until the end of 1916, when he replaced Asquith in the premiership. It will attempt to describe his last efforts as a reforming minister in a peacetime party government, and then his transformation into a dynamic war minister as the country faced an ordeal more profoundly disturbing than the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and probably more so than anything it had experienced since the Black Death.'This volume won the Wolfson Prize in 1985. It is a tragedy John Grigg didn't live to complete his magnum opus but what exists is a masterpiece. Faber Finds is reissuing the four volumes: The Young Lloyd George, Lloyd George: The People's Champion 1902-1911, Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912-1916, Lloyd George: War Leader 1916-1918.'The forcefulness of Grigg's writing makes this biography one of the very few books that are worth reading from cover to cover.' Norman Stone, Sunday Times'This is the biography. The research is thorough, the writing is lively, and above all, the stance is right.' Asa Briggs, Guardian'Lloyd George is extraordinarily lucky in his latest biographer. It is the measure of his rehabilitation that he can be weighed in the balance by such an exacting critic, found wanting in several important respects, and yet emerge with his human and political stature only enhanced.' John Campbell, The Times

Reissue of the 1989 Whitbread prize-winner to coincide with first publication of its sequel.

The epic military biography in three volumes of Field Marshal Montgomery. Vol 1: The making of a general, 1887-1942 Vol 2: Master of the battlefield, 1942-1944 Vol 3: The field marshal, 1944-1976

Bloomsbury Reader will publish great books which are currently unavailable in print where all English-lanugage rights have already been reverted to the author or the author's estate and where no edition is currently in print.

This profile of one of the most popular sovereigns of recent British history chronicles his uninspired early life and his development into a competent and principled monarch.

Vita Sackville-West - the most famous member of the Bloomsbury Group - was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs. Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

Within his lifetime T.S. Eliot came to be considered the greatest poet of his generation and perhaps the most important poet of this century. Two decades after his death, his reputation, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, remains as secure as ever. His influence has been profound: virtually every poet writing in English in the last fifty years owes a debt to him. Eliot achieved great success during his life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an influential magazine and book editor, he spoke widely on religion and social issues. But he was also a very private man who remained something of a mystery even to his closest friends. This is only one of a number of paradoxes in Eliot's life. Perhaps chief among them, as this biography demonstrates, was Eliot's insistence on the impersonality of great poetry while at the same time his own work was suffused with his experience and personality. In fact, as Peter Ackroyd points out, "His private choices and obsessions became emblematic of, and in some sense determined our understanding of, the twentieth-century tradition." Eliot insisted on the importance of literary tradition, yet he had no real predecessors or successors. Along with Pound, Joyce, and Woolf, he helped give birth to modernism in literature, but then later in his career he abandoned it. From this biography -- the first authoritative, comprehensive life of Eliot ever published -- we can at last understand the relationship of Eliot's life and work, the better to appreciate his artistic achievement. With this book we now have the first detailed account of Eliot's deeply troubled first marriage, as well as reliable descriptions of the solitude and misery of his middle years and the fulfillment and joy he found late in life in his second marriage. Scrupulously researched, elegantly written and insightful, T.S. Eliot is an accomplished portrait of an extraordinary figure. It will be an essential book for anyone who wants to understand one of the most important writers of the century. - Back cover.

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, A good/very good, clean and sound copy in black cloth boards, gilt title on spine and dust jacket. DJ is rubbed and worn at edges. **HEAVY BOOK approx 2KG. UK POSTAGE ONLY unless other arrangements made**

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Oxygen-deprived for two hours at birth, Christopher Nolan lived to write, at age twenty-one, the autobiography of his childhood, told as the story of Joseph Meehan. He wrote the book, using a "unicorn stick" attached to his head, letter by painful letter. The result is astonishingly lyrical, filled with powerful description, touching moments of triumph and humiliation, and, above all, disarming wit. It is, in the words of London's Daily Express, "a book of sheer wonder".

"Must surely rank among the most impressively intelligent biographies ever written."—Zena Sutherland, The Economist

In this landmark biography of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, A. N. Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life, and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy's art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia. He also breaks new ground in recreating the world that shaped the great novelist's life and art—the turmoil of ideas and politics in nineteenth-century Russia and the incredible literary renaissance that made Tolstoy's work possible. "Admirable. . . . Absorbing. . . . Superb."—Anthony Burgess "Stands as a model of the biographer's art: intelligent and opinionated, yet judicious—and, what's more, deliciously readable."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 24 pages of black and white illustrations

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge's poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief. - Publisher.

A study of the life of A.A.Milne, from his childhood, when he was educated at his father's school Henley House and taught by H.G.Wells, through his early days on "Granta" and "Punch", to the flowering of his careeer in the 1920s and 1930s. Milne wrote a series of West End plays, including "Mr Pim Passes By", and numbered among his friends P.G.Wodehouse and J.M.Barrie. It was for his son, born in 1920, that Milne wrote the four great children's books of his maturity: "When We Were Very Young", "Now We are Six", "Winnie the Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner". Revealing Milne's complexity, this biography tells of his strong political feelings, his often difficult personal relationships, and how his successful children's books became an almost intolerable burden. Ann Thwaite was awarded the 1990 Whitbread Biography of The Year for this book.

The author introduces material on the artist's early training in religious art, and establishes his passion for Barcelona and Catalan "modernisme". There are also portraits of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein who made up "The Picasso Gang". The book won the 1991 Whitbread biography award.

A woman's perspective on the life of Anthony Trollope reveals the family dynamics that shaped his growth and draws from Trollope's work to show how the writer truly felt about topics ranging from democracy to crinolines. 15,000 first printing. BOMC Alt.

Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkin's writing to remain unpublished: the letters to members of his family. These correspondences help tell the story of how Larkin came to be the writer and the man he was: to his father Sydney, a 'conservative anarchist' and admirer of Hitler, who died relatively early in Larkin's life; to his timid depressive mother Eva, who by contrast, lived long, and whose final years were shadowed by dementia; and to his sister Kitty, the sparse surviving fragment of whose correspondence with her brother gives an enigmatic glimpse of a complex and intimate relationship- But it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother in particular that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility. One surprising element in the volume, however, is the joie de vivre shown in the large number of witty and engaging drawings of himself and Eva, as 'Young Creature' and 'Old Creature', with which he enlivens his letters throughout the three decades of her widowhood. This important edition, meticulously edited by Larkin's biographer, James Booth, is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

In this award-winning biography, Roy Jenkins brings Gladstone and his century vibrantly to life. Born in Liverpool in 1809, Gladstone lived until 1898, spending 63 of his 89 years in the House of Commons. He served for 27 years in the Cabinet, and was Prime Minister four times, a unique accomplishment. From his early career as a Conservative and then a Peelite, through his important role in the formation of the Liberal Party to his late preoccupation with the cause of Irish Home Rule, he was a commanding politician and became a statesman greater even then Peel and a Parliamentarian greater even then Disraeli. Gladstone has been perhaps the most complex individual ever to be Prime Minister. He was a classical scholar, a wide-ranging author, and a participant in all the great theological and liturgical debates of the day, claiming that religion was always more important to him than politics. Gladstone read over 20,000 books and, when not suffering one of his frequent bouts of illness, walked great distances and chopped down trees for recreation. But he was also, as his 70 years of sustained diaries show, a man obsessed with terrible feelings of his own sinfulness, prone to self-flagellation and an often misunderstood practice of accosting prostitutes and attempting to persuade them of the errors of their ways. Gladstone was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and winner of the prestigious Whitbread Prize for biography. Written with the consummate grace of a gifted stylist, it offers a broad picture of a tumultuous century in British history. - Jacket flap.

Thomas Cranmer was the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. He was the Archbishop who guided England through the early Reformation, and Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere. Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-midland roots to early Tudor Cambridge, into the household of the family of Anne Boleyn, and through the political labyrinth of the Henrician court. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer navigated the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive English Prayer Books. MacCulloch skillfully reconstruction the crises which Cranmer negotiated, from his compromising association with three of Henry's divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as Queen, to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In gaol after Mary's accession, Cranmer nearly succumbed to recant his life's achievements, but was able to turn the very day of his death at the stake into a dramatic demonstration of his Protestant faith. From this vivid and fascinating account Cranmer emerges a more sharply-focused figure than before, more conservative early in his career than admirers have allowed, more evangelical than Anglicanism would later find comfortable.

In this biography of the great Victor Hugo, "by grasping the giant in his entirety, and in his many disguises, Robb rewards us with a panorama of French and European society from the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century."--Jacket.

Sex, intrigue and adultery in the world of high politics and huge wealth in late eighteenth-century England. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was one of the most flamboyant and influential women of the eighteenth century. The great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, she was variously a compulsive gambler, a political savante and operator of the highest order, a drug addict, an adulteress and the darling of the common people. This authoritative, utterly absorbing book presents a mesmerizing picture of a fascinating world of political and sexual intrigues, grand houses, huge parties, glamour and great wealth - always on the edge of being squandered by the excesses and scandals of individuals.

"What an improbable novel my life is!" Berlioz wrote in 1832 to his friend Albert Du Boys. To his sister Adele, "I am absorbed continually by the strangeness, the romanticness of my situation." What was continually absorbing Berlioz in 1832 was in fact his passionate pursuit of the actress Harriet Smithson, who for so long had resisted him, and whom he at last marries at the beginning of the second volume of David Cairns's masterly biography. To begin with, the marriage was a happy one, produced an adored son Louis, and released Berlioz's extraordinary creative energies. But Harriet was unable to find work. The marriage became unbalanced. Its end was tragic for them both. "Oh to forget, to forget!" He wrote after her death. "What can relieve me of memory, blot out all those pages from the book and volume of my heart!" The pursuit of love, and its defining place in Berlioz's life, is one of the great themes of Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness. It is only one among many brilliantly traced by the author. Cairns describes the genesis of the famous works of Berlioz's maturity -- Benvenuto Cellini, the Requiem, Romeo and Juliet, The Damnation of Faust and above all the crowning masterpiece The Trojans, neglected or mutilated for a century after its composition and which Cairns shows emerging from the classical passions of Berlioz's adolescence -- with exceptional insight and understanding. Rarely have the creative processes of a great artist been so amply revealed. But Berlioz stands in this volume not simply as a great and revolutionary composer: he was, in the opinion of Hans von Bulow, Sir Charles Halle and many others, "the finest conductor of his age", called upon all over Europe to perform above all Gluck and Beethoven as well as his own works. And it is evident, in this book perhaps for the first time, that he was also one of the finest critics and writers about music of the 19th century, in Cairns's opinion the finest until Shaw. - Jacket flap.

"Lorna Sage's adventure in autobiography is an anatomy of three marriages that brings to life her girlhood in postwar provincial Britain. Her early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather, a drinker, a womanizer, a vicar, exiled to a remote village on the Welsh border. His wife loathed him, lived on memories, and shook her fist at any parishioner bold enough to call at the house. From the vicarage Lorna watched the fading away of the old world and the slow dissolve of her grandparents' disastrous union.". "Then her father returns from the army and she moves with her parents and baby brother into a newly built house. Living with her parents, she quickly learns that the world is full of secrets and myths that mark her family - her mother's thwarted dreams, her father's addiction to work, and the mysterious emotional economy of their proper marriage. Longing to leave, Lorna vows she will never marry or have children, but before long she finds herself having grown up far too fast."--BOOK JACKET.

Edith Cavell was born on 4th December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, and shot in Brussels on 12th October 1915 by the Gestapo for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border.