In his masterpiece of family literature, AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER?, Blake Morrison's mother appears as an intriguing but mostly silent figure. This is her startling and touching story - and a son's search to discover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself again to adapt to a quieter post-war family life. At the heart of the book there's a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny, furious letters his parents wrote during their courtship. It evokes a surprising picture of life and love in WWII. From the obstacles the lovers faced, to their moments of hilarity and joy THINGS MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME is a revealing and poignant anatomy of family conflict, love, war, and finally marriage. Kim Morrison emerges quietly, magically from the shadows, a determined heroine for our times.

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

Den kendte advokat og tv-forfatter til Rumpole-episoderne John Mortimer (f. 1923) fortæller om sit senere liv gennem erindringer om sine venner

Following on from Osborne's first autobiographical book, A Better Class of Person, this book looks at the period 1955 to 1966. It covers the foundation of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre to the death of his artistic director and Osborne's mentor, George Devine. At the Royal Court he experienced years of high theatrical achievement and low backstage comedy. For the playwright it was a decade of baffling and often ludicrous notoriety and of emotional and matrimonial upheaval. During this period Osborne wrote The Entertainer, Luther, A Portrait for Me and Inadmissible Evidence, was propositioned by Marlene Dietrich, spent the night in a Mexican brothel, consoled Vivien Leigh, grappled with the Lord Chamberlain in St James's Palace and won an Oscar.

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