In recent years Eric Ravilious has become recognized as one of the most important British artists of the 20th century, whose watercolours and wood engravings capture an essential sense of place and the spirit of mid-century England. What is less appreciated is that he did not work in isolation, but within a much wider network of artists, friends and lovers influenced by Paul Nashs teaching at the Royal College of Art Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Enid Marx, Tirzah Garwood, Percy Horton,...

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2014Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best BiographyNew York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the YearPenelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERVenture behind closed doors to uncover the secrets of life in the English country house between the wars – in all its splendour.During the 1920s and 1930s, as the sun set slowly on the British Empire, England's stately homes concealed worlds both opulent and ordinary, noble and viscious. This was a life draped in myth, hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles.Drawing on hundreds of memo...

Jeremy Paxman's unique portrait of the Victorian age takes readers on an exciting journey through the birth of modern Britain. Using the paintings of the era as a starting point, he tells us stories of urban life, family, faith, industry and empire that helped define the Victorian spirit and imagination.To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, and his exploration of Victorian art and society shows how these artists were chronicling a world changing before their ...

A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of nineteenth-century men and women, from the author of the bestselling ‘The Victorian House’.Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork – a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. That was what England was like in the early eighteenth century. Yet by the close ...

The Empress of Crime's life was the ultimate detective story – revealed for the first time in this forthright and perceptive biography.While Ngaio Marsh had a flamboyant public persona, she was fiercely protective of her private life. And no one knows better how to cover tracks with red herrings and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer…This fascinating biography of Ngaio Marsh pieces together both the public and private Marsh in a way that is as rivetin...

Why did London Underground once employ a one-legged man to ride up and down the escalators at Earl's Court tube station? What did Hitler plan to do with Nelson's Column? Why is London's only medieval mummy a prostitute named Clarice la Claterballock? How did a beer flood in Tottenham Court Road drown nine people? Where can you see a pair of Queen Victoria's knickers?Containing chapters covering London past and present; buildings and streets; famous and unexpected Londoners; arts, li...

'I wanted to climb inside this book and live there' PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE'This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it' MIRIAM MARGOLYES'Superb, sparky and reflective' The Spectator'Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? Young Bloomsbury explores a place and time when queer life blossomed' Washington Post...

John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable’s originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a ne...

"Brings literature lovers on a journey through London, from Chaucer in the fourteenth century to present day . . . as diverse as the city itself." — British Heritage TravelMany of the greatest names in literature have visited or made their home in the colorful and diverse metropolis of London. From Charles Dickens to George Orwell, Virginia Woolf to Bernadine Evaristo, London's writers have brought the city to life through some of the bes...

The story of Penguin Books, Allen Lane and how they changed the world, to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Penguin'An invaluable and fascinating account' NICK HORNBY'Outstanding' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS'A triumph . . . rich and humorous' ROGER LEWISBy founding Penguin Books in 1935 and popularizing the paperback, Allen Lane not only changed publishing in Britain – he was also at the forefront of a social and cultural ...

A spellbinding portrait of the Hampstead Modernists, threading together the lives, loves, rivalries and ambitions of a group of artists at the heart of an international avant-garde.Hampstead in the 1930s. In this peaceful, verdant London suburb, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson have embarked on a love affair – a passion that will launch an era-defining art movement.In her chronicle of the exhilarating rise and fall of British Modernism, Caroline Maclean c...