Biography of one of the central figures in the cultural life and tastes of his time.

This fascinating biography of Thackeray’s eccentric daughter, Anny, portrays the intricate web of her relatives and friends, among whom were the Dickens family and the Tennysons, Browning and Ruskin -- all appearing in a more personal light than seen before.

Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, lived during a period of dramatic historical, political, and social change in Britain, and was by any standard a superb observer of his times. Through his pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction he commented on anything and everything, from birth control to the price of coal, from flying machines to academies for women, from security for the aged to the dangers of the plague. In his fiction he created a type of vivid realism that powerfully influenced the development of the novel. The publication of works such as Robinson Crusoe are major events because they shape the ways in which we see our world, so that ever afterwards thoughts of desolation and desert islands immediately evoke Defoe's masterpiece. We should not be surprised: Defoe always wrote to make things happen. During his career as an author, he was a provocative pamphleteer, journalist, and poet; but when he was not writing, he was, at times, a spy and a double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer. He was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned four times or more, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he never lost confidence in his ability as a writer and thinker. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers--his career as a writer. From his earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions. This life gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that went into such great works as Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.

John Lehmann (1907-1987) was, for 50 years, at the centre of literary life in England. In this biography, his professional and private lives are brought together and re-evaluated.

The life of Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. She enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the Thames valley, and she was much pursued while at Cambridge, but an early marriage to Leslie Runciman was wretchedly unhappy. The phenomenal success of her shocking, first novel, Dusty Answer gave her the means to run off with and eventually marry the glamorous maverick, Wogan Philipps. They lived an apparently charmed existence in Oxfordshire, the golden couple at the very heart of Bloomsbury society. But as Rosamond's novels (Invitation to the Waltz, the notorious The Weather in the Streets) became ever more successful, Wogan started on a series of affairs, finally disappearing to the Spanish Civil War, while Rosamond embarked on a tempestuous relationship with Goronwy Rees. When Rees left her she began the most important love affair of her life with the poet, Cecil Day Lewis. Nine years later, he abandoned her for the young actress, Jill Balcon - a betrayal from which Rosamond never recovered. A few years later her daughter, Sally, died at the age of 24, an unendurable loss which led Rosamond into spiritualism in an attempt to find her. The Biography of Rosamond Lehmann conjures up with warmth and wit the intimate world 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.

The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family. Prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century, they had a wide and significant influence. Examining Lytton Strachey, his parents and nine siblings, Barbara Caine provides a fascinating picture of a diverse and complex family in a period of change from Victorian England to the beat generation. - ;The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family, prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century. The Strachey Family examines the lives of Lytton Strachey, a well-known member of the Bloomsbury set, his nine siblings, and his parents. Richard Strachey worked in India, marrying Jane, the daughter of the Indian Chief Justice, in 1859. A successful imperial couple, they were progressive, following the ideas of Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill, and the teachings of science. Their ten children were born over a period of 27 years and reflect the development and changes in a Victorian society moving to modernity. The richness of their letters provides a fascinating picture of a large, complex, and diverse family where attitudes to the family name, gender tensions, differing views on sexuality, ideas on modernity, and varying degrees of support for feminism all played a part. Dick Strachey, the eldest son, had an unsuccessful military career in India but a loving marriage, whereas Oliver announced to horrified parents that he wished to learn the piano and give music lessons, eventually finding success as a code-breaker in both world wars. Elinor, married to a man of wealth and position, devoted her life exclusively to family and social life, whilst Ralph, Chief Surveyor in India, married a woman who suffered emotional and nervous collapses and was unable to manage a family. Pippa, a full-time suffrage organizer and, in all but name, head of the family, combined the Victorian devoted single daughter with the twentieth century independent career woman, and James, a homosexual in adolescence, married Alix, one of the Bloomsbury cropheads who embraced sexual experimentation, psychoanalysis, and new patterns of domestic life. The remaining children, including Lytton, all had lives no less absorbing, and it is the examination of these lives, as well as relating the issues which they faced to wider society, which make Barbara Caine's study so captivating and intriguing. - ;Bombay to Bloomsbury provides grippingly readable insight into British history between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries through the life histories of this extraordinary family. - Pat Thane, BBC History Magazine;Its broad sweep of connecting ideas and its revealing and often amusing detail of the lives of the less well-known Stracheys. - Sarah Curtis, TLS;That biography and history can be fruitful friends is brilliantly demonstrated in Barbara Caine's new book about the Strachey family. - The Guardian;Sterling work, meticulous research, something of great value. - Sunday Times

This volume is a detailed history of the Dreyfus family and through them France's Jewish community, which spans six generations, from the French Revolution to World War II. At the centre of the book is the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, one of the most chilling examples of persecution, and one of the most complex and controversial political and cultural events of the 20th century - a case which split the French nation and revealed the true extent of 19th-century anti-Semitism.