Today, Philip Henry Gosse is remembered, if at all, as the patriarch and tyrannical religious maniac in his son Edmund's memoir, Father and Son. This is a vivid reassessment of the life of Philip Henry Gosse, the renowned Victorian naturalist, author, illustrator and Christian fundamentalist, who as both friend and antagonist of Charles Darwin, was at the very heart of the Victorian conflict between science and religion. Thwaite shows that Gosse believed that "the gratification of scientific curiosity is worse than useless if we ignore God."--Publisher.

Although he died more than forty years ago this is the first full-scale biography of Matthew Smith, one of the most original English figurative painters of the century. He was in his lifetime frequently, but mistakenly, seen as an English Fauve or as a disciple of Matisse, but in fact he evolved his own distinctive style independently from anything he had seen in English art schools or the French galleries. Smith was the son of a rich and cultured Yorkshire manufacturer, but soon felt impelled to rebel against the Victorian taste of his father and his class. He failed to impress tutors at the Slade, went to France to see what the modern movements there had to offer, and then returned to mingle in the circles round Sickert and Fry. His grim experiences in World War 1 forced him to sort out his priorities both as a man and an artist. Eventually, a passionate love affair in middle age enabled him to establish his own uniquely turbulent style and subject matter of still-lifes, landscapes and uninhibited nudes. Augustus John and Epstein were close friends as were many other literary and artistic figures in Paris, Provence and London. He was shaken by personal tragedies, but well into old age he seemed able to attract the love of cultivated and attractive younger women. There have been several retrospective exhibitions since his death in 1959, notably at the Royal Academy and twice at the Barbican. Dr Yorke's detailed biography traces the life and reputation of this unassuming man who 'spoke like an intelligent moth' , but who produced pictures of such rich colour and extrovert handling that they have no parallels in the history of English painting.

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.