"I never killed Raoul Loveday with a magical spell". Aleister Crowley, otherwise known as the Beast 666, shared membership of the Golden Dawn with W B Yeats, and publishers with D H Lawrence. Now in a beyond-the-grave autobiography, he recounts his own vocation, his practice of sex magic, and his bruising encounters with his contemporaries. The great magus, whose own world-conquering creed The Book of the Law was written in Cairo in 1904, was according to him, no murderer, but a prophet and practitioner of all kinds of sexual freedom and new magical systems.

Rupert Brooke became for many the embodiment of a generation that was all but wiped out between 1914 and 1918. He became a legend largely due to one of his sonnets: If I should die, think only this of me / That there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. The poem, and all that it represented, became the focal point of a nation's grief for its lost youth.

This book recounts their lives as Britain descended into turmoil, with the Asquith sons fighting in the trenches as their father, the Prime Minister, struggled to direct the bloodiest war in his country's history. Margot Asquith's remarkable role as the most intriguing of primeministerial wives is fully explored: her feuds with Lloyd George, her mistrust of the gutter genius Winston Churchill, and her hatred of Lord Northcliffe, the press baron who ultimately drove her husband from power in 1916. At the heart of the story are four of the Asquith children, Raymond, the brilliant scholar and outstanding President of the Oxford Union, who died leading his men into attack on the Somme; the shy Beb, artillery officer and poet, who overcame shell shock to face the horrors of Passchendale; Oc, whom General Freyberg - himself a VC - described as the bravest man I ever knew; and their mercurial sister Violet, her father's most ardent supporter but the bane of her jealous stepmother's life. Drawing for the first time on Margot Asquith's own journals, Asquith's letters to her, and a mass of hitherto unpublished correspondence, Colin Clifford provides an engrossing picture of a remarkable political family at a time of crisis.

Analyzes the storied career of one of Germany's most famous military leaders

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into an extraordinary portrait of Celine's temptuous life and times. Photographs.

Young Betjeman opens Bevis Hillier's biographical trilogy of John Betjeman. It was first published in 1988 and has been reissued to accompany John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love, which deals with the poet at the peak of his success.

Argues that the great "renaissance man" was in fact the first great modern man of science.

Virginia Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel was what she called 'a little escapade', begun to 'ease my brain' in the wake of The Waves (1931).

This is an autobiography of the writer, Simon Raven, who has always been a rebel in the eyes of the establishment. Expelled from school, he 'withdrew' from Cambridge and was nearly drummed out of his regiment for 'indecent conduct'. It was then that he decided to become a writer, a profession he saw as free from any degree of moral or social judgement.

Discusses the life and times of the poet, author, traveler, and aesthetic adventurer, examining his role as a cultural pioneer, his extraordinary family, and his friendships

An epic yet intimate portrait of two theatrical dynasties, which takes us from the Victorian stage to the modern age. Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the “uncrowned queen of England,” but behind her public success lay a darker story. The child bride of G.F. Watts, she eloped with a friend of Oscar Wilde’s at the age of twenty-one and gave birth to two illegitimate children. But her greatest partnership was on stage with Henry Irving. At the Lyceum Theatre in London, the two of them created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage — and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen’s children in particular. Edy Craig founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism. He had thirteen children by eight women. He is, perhaps, the most extraordinary man Michael Holroyd has ever written about.