"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.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into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

The diary of the 17th Earl of Derby, once thought to have been lost, provides a detailed and important account of the last months of the First World War as seen through the eyes of the British Ambassador in Paris. Derby was in many ways an unlikely choice as ambassador. He was not a diplomat and could not, on his arrival, speak French. His appointment owed much to Lloyd George’s determination to remove him from his previous post as Secretary of State for War. But, after a somewhat uncertain start, he proved to be a very successful ambassador upon whom successive Foreign Secretaries, Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon, relied heavily for their appreciation of the situation on the other side of the Channel. Derby took up his appointment at a crucial period of the war when military victory still seemed some way off. He became an assiduous collector of information which he dictated into his diary on a daily basis. Derby’s embassy became renowned for its lavish hospitality. But this was far from being self-indulgence, for he firmly believed that entertaining was the best way to win the confidence of his French associates and therefore to obtain information that would be of use in London. Derby’s diary provides important insights into the state of the war, the often strained relationship between Britain and France and the intrigues of French domestic politics.

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).

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.

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

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.

This work presents the Billie Holiday story - her rise to the top from the slums and the streets, to the eventual slide down.