Time period: 20th century

We all know who 'the girl' is. She holds the hero's hand as he runs through the Pyramids, chasing robots. Or she nags him, or foils him, plays the uptight straight man to his charming loser. She's idealised, degraded, dismissed, objectified and almost always dehumanised. How do we process these i...

It's August 1914. You are 16-year-old Tommy Atkins, living in London. Set against a backdrop of the war just broken out in Europe, find out what your life was like after joining up and being sent to the trenches. From sharing your bed with rats and lice to a diet of bully beef, bread and biscuits...

Surprisingly little has been written about second-generation Bloomsbury who tantalised the original 'Bloomsburies' at Gordon Square parties with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. 'Young Bloomsbury' introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist a...

SOE agent Violette Szabo was the daughter of an English father and French mother, and widow of a French army officer killed in action in North Africa in 1942. On her second mission she was captured by the Germans, interrogated and tortured, and deported to Germany where she was eventually execute...

This major biography traces the life of the 20th century's most important poet from his childhood in the ragtime city of St Louis right up to the publication of his most famous poem, 'The Waste Land'. Meticulously detailed, it portrays a brilliant, shy and wounded American who defied his parents'...

Published simultaneously in Britain and America to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, this major biography traces the life of the twentieth century's most important poet from his childhood in the ragtime city of St Louis right up to the publication of his most famous poem,...

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H.G. Wells' extraordinary...

Every failure that poet Michael Davenport suffers in his efforts to become established as a professional writer weighs against the uneasy knowledge that his wife, Lucy, has an untapped private fortune amounting to millions of dollars.

Revisiting the bomb-sites and boozers of his childhood and adolescence, Ray Winstone takes the reader on an unforgettable tour of a cockney heartland which is at once irresistibly mythic and undeniably real.

This fascinating account of young women's lives challenges existing assumptions about working class life and womanhood in England between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the 1950s. Selina Todd uses extensive oral histories and autobiographical material.

A memoir of Bish, a volunteer soldier who fought in the trenches in the First World War and lived until 1973. He fathered four children. The youngest, Beti Hand, lived to write this.

This is the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography. The narrative begins in 1959, with the author's return from Brunei and the start of a professional writing career and ends in 1982 with the centenary celebrations of James Joyce's birth.

A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents' native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, l...

A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents' native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, l...

'Zennor in Darkness' is a fictional account of the lives of people living in Cornwall during the First World War. The central characters are D.H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda, who become the butt of much scorn and gossip during the spring of 1917.

Brighton, 1950. When the body of a girl is found, cut into three, DI Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick called the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend. They served together in the war as part of a shadowy unit called the Magic Men. Max is still on the ...

The life of Zoli Novotna begins on the leafy backroads of Slovakia, when she and her grandfather come upon a quiet lake where their family has been drowned by fascist guards. Zoli and her grandfather flee to join up with another clan of travelling harpists. So begins a tale of song, intimacy and ...

Zoli's life begins on the backroads of Slovakia. When she & her grandfather come upon a lake where their family has been drowned by fascist guards. Zoli & her grandfather flee to join up with another clan of travelling harpists.