Product Description: One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the YearIn December 1937, young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees into Spain as a wartime volunteer from England, and in so doing walked straight into a loyalist prison and the bitter conflict of the Spanish Civil War...read more

Product Description: "The greatest irony is that it was to George Smiley, modelled largely on Bingham, that le Carré owed his success."—London Review of BooksFollowing the film success of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carré's hero George Smiley has come to be seen as the perfect spy...read more

Product Description: With a career that spanned from the silent era to the 1990s, British screenwriter Charles Bennett (1899–1995) lived an extraordinary life. His experiences as an actor, director, playwright, film and television writer, and novelist in both England and Hollywood left him with many amusing anecdotes, opinions about his craft, and impressions of the many famous people he knew...read more

The story of Mary Poppins, the quintessentially English and utterly magical children's nanny, is remarkable enough. She was instantly hailed as a classic, then became a household name when Julie Andrews stepped into the role in Disney's hugely successfulfilm. Now she is a Broadway sensation all over again. But the story of Mary Poppins's creator, as this first biography reveals, is just as unexpected and remarkable. Australian journalist Pamela Lyndon Travers came to London in 1924. She became involved with theosophy and traveled in the literary circles of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Most famously, she clashed with Walt Disney over the film adaptation. As tart and opinionated as the big-screen Mary Poppins was cheery, her love of mysticism and magic shaped her life as well as the character of the clipped, strict and ultimately mysterious nanny. She fervently believed that 'everyday life is the miracle.'--From publisher description.

Product Description: Norman Lewis recounts the first half of his adventurous life with his dry, infectious, laconic wit. He takes us on a journey that transforms a stammering schoolboy into a worldly-wise multilingual sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, on the point of becoming a legendary travel writer...read more

Product Description: Nancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Anaïs Nin said 'I think often of Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again.' As the first wife Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, it is perhaps surprising that she is an unknown entity, a constant presence in the biographies of Durrell and others in the Bloomsbury set, yet always a shadowy figure, beautiful and enigmatic...read more

Product Description: In the spring and summer of 1931, Wyndham Lewis traveled to Morocco. Escaping the furor that surrounded the publication of his controversial book on Hitler, while in Morocco, Lewis explored the culture of the Berbers of Morocco. In Journey into Barbary, Lewis provides a first-hand look into the people and culture of the region...read more

Product Description: In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C...read more

Product Description: In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C...read more

Described in a recent New York Times Magazine profile as a "postcolonial Philip Roth," Hanif Kureishi first captured the attention of audiences and critics in the 1980s with the award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In three decades of acclaimed work, Kureishi has written fiction and films exploring a series of interconnected themes about identity and desire—from Islamic radicalism to kinky sex, and from psychoanalysis to the relationships of fathers and sons. After discovering an abandoned manuscript of his father’s, hidden for years, Kureishi was compelled to turn his "unflinching perspective" (Time Out) onto his own history. Like Roth, Martin Amis and Geoffrey Wolfe, who also have written books about their fathers, Kureishi wanted to understand and perhaps to reconcile. My Ear at His Heart offers remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, chronicling how Kureishi’s own literary calling emerged from the ashes of his father’s aspirations. And so begins a journey that takes Kureishi through his father’s privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, through the turbulent birth of Pakistan and to his modest adult life in England—his days spent as a civil servant, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. "A beguiling and complex tale of fact, fiction and family tensions" (The Guardian), My Ear at His Heart was published to great acclaim in the United Kingdom in 2004 and went on to win the prestigious Prix France Culture Etranger. Now, this profound work from one of the most compelling artists of our time is at last available in a Scribner edition.

Product Description: An intellectual who did not like intellectuals, a socialist who did not trust the state, a writer of the left who found it easier to forgive writers of the right, a liberal who was against free markets, a Protestant who believed in religion but not in God, a fierce opponent of nationalism who defined Englishness for a generation...read more

Product Description: Ford Madox Ford wrote some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, mastering and metamorphosing all its major forms: the novel, literary criticism, travel writing, even historical and cultural discourse. He was also an innovative and influential poet, as well as the century's greatest literary editor...read more

Product Description: A very readable companion, this Brief Guide includes everything J.R.R. Tolkien: a brief biography, a critical view of Tolkien and what the literati think of him, his profession as a linguist, how Beowulf and other works influenced him, how he invented the nomenclatures and languages for Middle-earth, and much more...read more

Product Description: The second volume of Max Saunders's magisterial biography of Ford Madox Ford takes up the story from Ford's enlistment in the army and departure for France in 1916. Like its predecessor, The After-War World makes full use of previously unpublished and long-lost material...read more