Well past their prime, the ladies who rent rooms in Amy Doll's house indulge in genteel prostitution with their elderly gentlemen friends in order to pay the rent. How will Amy keep her daughter in ignorance of the scandalous goings-on? A tale poking fun at the English passion for respectability.

"The Evelyn Waugh who emerges from this fascinating and masterful account is a far different, and a far more complex, figure than the one most readers know. . . . Not only supersedes all earlier accounts of the writer but also is a model of the biographer's art." --Michael Gorra, New York Newsday

In the first full-length biography of Anthony Powell, Michael Barber--publisher, journalist, and man-about-town--takes a close look at the man and the writer. He finds someone whose temperament was often at war with his upbringing. The son of an army officer, educated at Eton and Oxford, Powell chose as his closest friends people like Malcolm Muggeridge and the composer Constant Lambert, who were not out of the top drawer, or the one below it. Although happily married for more than sixty years to Lady Violet Pakenham, the daughter of an earl, he admitted that he had always been attracted by girls who looked as if they'd slept under a bush for a week. Powell believed that creative writing was, like alchemy, a mysterious, indefinable process by which experience became art. Michael Barber focuses on the experience that provided Powell with his raw material. He pays particular attention to the entre-deux-guerres, that sharply divided cultural interlude when the artists and good-timers with whom Powell identified in the twenties were followed, in the thirties, by the politicians and the prigs. Amusing, candid, and highly entertaining, this is a delightfully readable account of the author

A sensual Calvinist, a Tory radical, a consumptive celebrant of action, a Passionate Scot who chose to live anywhere but Scotland. Not for nothing was Robert Louis Stevenson the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The greatest of Scottish novelists, Stevenson lived a life as extraordinary and as absorbing as his books. But it was a life tormented by an autocratic father, recurring illness, the prudery of the Victorian reading public and, most of all, the stresses imposed on him by his wife and stepchildren. This powerful new study is published to mark the centenery of Stevenson's death at the age of forty-four.

Biografie van de Amerikaanse schrijfster (1903-1977).