A long overdue biography of the power couple that nurtured and influenced the literary world of early twentieth-century England"I write primarily to pay homage to a beloved friend, but also in the hope that some future chronicler of the history of art and letters in our time may give to Sydney and Violet Schiff the place which is their due."—T. S. Eliot, in a letter appended to Violet Schiff's obituary, Times of London*, July 9, 1962*

Is a tower block, your unmade bed, your lavatory basin, or the bicycle chained to the gate next door a work of art? Why should a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end; or even a story? Whether we recognise it or not, virtually every aspect of our life today has been influenced in part by the aesthetic legacy of Modernism. In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler examines how and why Modernism began, explaining what it is and showing how it has gradually informed a...

A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel.Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of th...

This edition does not include illustrations.Please note that due to the level of detail, the family tree is best viewed on a tablet.The wayward life (1898–1979) of the voracious art collector and great female patron of world-famous artists.‘Mrs Guggenheim, how many husbands have you had?’ ‘Do you mean my own, or other people’s?’ Peggy Guggenheim was an American millionairess art collector and legendary lover, whose father died on the Titanic returning from installin...

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done…great fun to read." — New York Times Book ReviewA fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of biographical essays, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among o...

The astonishing untold story of Violet Gibson, an Irish woman who tried to stop the rise of fascism and change the course of history."Superb. . . . Poignant. . . . A beguiling detective story and, as such, a meditation on the limits of biography. . . . Saunders writes with a clarity of purpose, an eloquence and a satiric edge that refreshes and astonishes." — The NationAt 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 7, 1926, a woma...

W. H. Auden disapproved of literary biography. Or did he? The truth is far more equivocal than at first seems apparent. There is no denying he delivered himself of such unambiguous pronouncements as 'Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.'; and that he asked for his friends to burn his letters at his death, but, against that, Auden himself often reviewed literary biographies and normally with enthusiasm. Moreover he argued for biographies of writers such as...

Alexandra Harris's hugely acclaimed Romantic Moderns (winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award) overturned our picture of modernist culture during the interwar years. In her second book, she brings her attention to one of the towering figures of literary modernism. It is an intensely pleasurable read that weaves together the life and work of Virginia Woolf, and serves as an ideal introduction to both. Following the chronology of Woolf's life, it considers each of the novels in context,...

A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

In 1934, Veza Taubner and Elias Canetti were married in Vienna. Elias describes the arrangement to his brother Georges as a “functional” marriage. Meanwhile, an intense intellectual love affair develops between Veza and Georges, a young doctor suffering fromtuberculosis. Four years later, Veza and Elias flee Nazi-ruled Vienna to London, where they lead an impoverished and extremely complicated marital life in exile.Spanning the major part of Elias’s struggle for literary recognition...

Private faces in public placesAre wiser and nicerThan public faces in private places.W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in 1995. In choosing from these voluminous journals for the new edition, the editors have tried to provide a picture of the various lives Spender brought together in autobiographic...

Alexander Rucki is the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and his book is both a reminder of mans breathtaking inhumanity to man and the absolute miracle of survival. These long-term effects are seen in hindsight over sixty years later. One can only begin to imagine what it wouldve been like to be sixteen and the sole survivor of a Nazi death camp. Its been done beforeDiary of Anne Frank and Schindlers List among the two most popularbut this tragedy is constantly revisited, and I suspec...