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.

The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family. Prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century, they had a wide and significant influence. Examining Lytton Strachey, his parents and nine siblings, Barbara Caine provides a fascinating picture of a diverse and complex family in a period of change from Victorian England to the beat generation. - ;The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family, prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century. The Strachey Family examines the lives of Lytton Strachey, a well-known member of the Bloomsbury set, his nine siblings, and his parents. Richard Strachey worked in India, marrying Jane, the daughter of the Indian Chief Justice, in 1859. A successful imperial couple, they were progressive, following the ideas of Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill, and the teachings of science. Their ten children were born over a period of 27 years and reflect the development and changes in a Victorian society moving to modernity. The richness of their letters provides a fascinating picture of a large, complex, and diverse family where attitudes to the family name, gender tensions, differing views on sexuality, ideas on modernity, and varying degrees of support for feminism all played a part. Dick Strachey, the eldest son, had an unsuccessful military career in India but a loving marriage, whereas Oliver announced to horrified parents that he wished to learn the piano and give music lessons, eventually finding success as a code-breaker in both world wars. Elinor, married to a man of wealth and position, devoted her life exclusively to family and social life, whilst Ralph, Chief Surveyor in India, married a woman who suffered emotional and nervous collapses and was unable to manage a family. Pippa, a full-time suffrage organizer and, in all but name, head of the family, combined the Victorian devoted single daughter with the twentieth century independent career woman, and James, a homosexual in adolescence, married Alix, one of the Bloomsbury cropheads who embraced sexual experimentation, psychoanalysis, and new patterns of domestic life. The remaining children, including Lytton, all had lives no less absorbing, and it is the examination of these lives, as well as relating the issues which they faced to wider society, which make Barbara Caine's study so captivating and intriguing. - ;Bombay to Bloomsbury provides grippingly readable insight into British history between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries through the life histories of this extraordinary family. - Pat Thane, BBC History Magazine;Its broad sweep of connecting ideas and its revealing and often amusing detail of the lives of the less well-known Stracheys. - Sarah Curtis, TLS;That biography and history can be fruitful friends is brilliantly demonstrated in Barbara Caine's new book about the Strachey family. - The Guardian;Sterling work, meticulous research, something of great value. - Sunday Times

This volume is a detailed history of the Dreyfus family and through them France's Jewish community, which spans six generations, from the French Revolution to World War II. At the centre of the book is the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, one of the most chilling examples of persecution, and one of the most complex and controversial political and cultural events of the 20th century - a case which split the French nation and revealed the true extent of 19th-century anti-Semitism.

The composer and music critic portrays his life and describes his friendships with figures such as D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas

Dit boek vertelt het verhaal van de arbeidersjongen Herman van Veen (1945) die uitgroeide tot een van de meest veelzijdige artiesten van Nederland en tot op de dag van vandaag grote internationale waardering oogst. In 1965 beklom Van Veen voor het eerst het podium en sindsdien reist hij met zijn voorstellingen de wereld over. Hij verrijkte de Nederlandse muziek met prachtige liedjes. Herman van Veen speelt viool, zingt, componeert, schrijft, acteert en regisseert, schildert en is de geestelijk vader van de wereldberoemde stripfiguur-eend Alfred Jodocus Kwak. Van Veen zet zich al veertig jaar actief in voor de rechten van het kind, is jarenlang ambassadeur voor Unicef en mag zich naast de vele internationale onderscheidingen die hem ten deel vielen Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw noemen.

The extraordinary 1950s London childhood of one of Britain's best-loved politicians. Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual, particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in the slums of post-war Britain, but in its transition from two-parent family to single mother and then to no parents at all. This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child. Played out against the background of a vanishing community living in condemned housing, the story moves from post-war austerity in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, through the race riots, school on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, to the rock-and-roll years, making a record in Denmark Street and becoming a husband and father whilst still in his teens. This Boy is one man's story, but it is also a story of England and the West London slums which are so hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries.

Paul Johnson, the celebrated historian, grew up in Tunstall, one of the six towns around Stoke-on-Trent that made up the Potteries'. From an early age he was fascinated by the strange beauty of its volcanic landscape of fiery furnaces belching out heat and smoke. As a child he often accompanied his father - headmaster of the local art school and desperate to find jobs for his students, for this was the Hungry Thirties - to the individual pottery firms and their coal-fired ovens. His adored mother and father are at the heart of this story and his older sisters who, as much as his parents, brought him up. life was extraordinarily free and unsupervised. No door was locked - Poverty was everywhere but so were the Ten Commandments.' The book ends in 1938 as the 11-year-old author queues at the town-hall for a gas mask.

A woman of intellect and ambition describes growing up on an Australian ranch, coping with her father's death and her mother's depression, her intellectual awakening at the university, and her path to becoming Smith College's first woman president