Topic: Biography & non-fiction prose

Even in the third decade of the 21st century, it is still harder for women to make a career in science than men. Two centuries ago, however, at the beginning of the 19th century, when science as we know it was just getting started, the situation was far worse. Then, the very notion of a female sc...

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

From autism to allergies, ADHD to long Covid, more people are being labelled with medical conditions than ever before. But can a diagnosis do us more harm than good? The boundaries between sickness & health are being redrawn. Mental health categories are shifting all the time, radically altering ...

The Cambridge spies continue to fascinate - but one of them, John Cairncross, has always been more of an enigma than the others. He worked alone and was driven by his hostility to Fascism rather than to the promotion of Communism. During his war-time work at Bletchley Park, he passed documents to...

In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1942, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather ...

In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1942, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather ...

In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1944, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather ...

Here is an evocative memoir of family, food, and migration. As a child, Or Rosenboim's knowledge of her family history was based on the food her grandmothers cooked for her - round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, stuffed vine leaves, herby green rice with a sq...

This is a biography of Cambridge mathematician, mastermind code-breaker and inventor of the super-computer, Alan Turing.

It's just you. Standing at the crease. Waiting. The bowler is running. His arm swinging. The ball - 155 grams of cork, string and leather - is hurled at you. At 90 mph it travels 22 yards in under half a second. You can barely see it and you've got to be swinging your bat before its halfway towar...

Albert Finney was a Salford-born, homework-hating bookie's son who broke the social barriers of British film. He did his share of roistering, and yet outlived his contemporaries and dodged typecasting to become a five-time Oscar nominee and one of our most durable international stars. Bon vivant,...

When the mystic, occult magician, poet, and founder of the religious philosophy of Thelema, Aleister Crowley died in an obscure boarding house in Hastings, England, on December 5th 1947, at the age of 72, few knew he was to become one of the most enduring pop culture figures of the next hundred y...

The riveting life of Alexander Hamilton, an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean who overcame all the odds to become George Washington's aide-de-camp and the first Treasury Secretary of the United States. Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated than Ale...

Meticulously researched, vividly written and bringing to bear a lifetime's scholarship, this is a biography of one of the most remarkable rulers in history - Alexander the Great.

This is a wild journey through 19th-century India and Afghanistan, with impeccably researched storytelling that shows us a world of espionage and dreamers, ne'er-do-wells and opportunists, extreme violence both personal and military, and boundless hope. At the edge of empire, amid the deserts and...

Whether serving in the US Army in World War II, or during his burgeoning career as a teenage comedian in the Catskills, Mel Brooks was always mining his experiences for material. His iconic career began with Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, where he was part of the greatest writers' room in histo...

Whether serving in the US Army in World War II, or during his burgeoning career as a teenage comedian in the Catskills, Mel Brooks was always mining his experiences for material. His iconic career began with Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, where he was part of the greatest writers' room in histo...