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

Vraaggesprekken met vooraanstaande personen uit politiek en zakenleven.

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 volume of interviews and recollections offers a kaleidoscopic view of E.M. Forster's character as observed and remembered by college associates, close friends, chance acquaintances and fellow writers. These forty-six pieces, some published here for the first time, variously reveal facets of his private and public personalities: Forster the subtle analyst of middle-class England, the spokesman for liberal causes and humane values, the Cambridge insider and the committed friend.

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.

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

Thompson groped his way to being a grown up. He excelled at school and met a girl - the girl of the title - who recognised his ambition to escape the miserable lives his parents had made for each other. After a disastrous childhood, he set himself the task of discovering the healing waters of pure ordinariness.

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.

Cyril Connolly, who attended Eaton with George Orwell and Oxford with Evelyn Waugh, spent his youth among the masters of the modern movement -- Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Gide, Huxley, Hemingway -- developing a literary sensibility that would lead him to found Horizon (for years the foremost literary magazine in England) and serve him well as chief among English reviewers for three decades. The Evening Colonnade is a collection of criticism dedicated to life, from a man whose life was dedicated to love and appreciation of the best. Whether writing on Ezra Pound's silence, the decay of Venice, Baudelaire's Paris, Scott Fitzgerald dining with Edith Wharton, the nineties, the twenties of his school days, Voltaire, Mailer, Jung, Africa, or English country homes, Connolly's prose exemplifies a style that the American Academy celebrated as "warmly observant of everything human, with aphoristic elegance and kaleidoscopic profundity."

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.