Memoir & biography Books 126 results

Janis Tomlinson

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern eraThe life of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and ...

Gerald Murnane

This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics 'Border Districts' and 'Tamarisk Row', and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. `Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, inc...

Matt Haig

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn't give up. The Comfort Book is a collection of little islands of hope. It gathers consolations and stories that give new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. Matt Haig's mix of philosophy, memoir and self-reflection builds on the wisdom of philosophers and survivors through the ages, from Marcus Aurelius to Nellie Bly, Emily D...

Emily Brand

"In the early eighteenth century, Newstead Abbey was among the most admired aristocratic homes in England. It was the abode of William, 4th Baron Byron - a popular amateur composer and artist - and his teenage wife Frances. But by the end of the century, the building had become a crumbling and ill-cared-for ruin. Surrounded by wreckage of his inheritance, the 4th Baron's dissip...

Joan Didion

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their daughter fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, t...

Desmond Seward

From 1853 to 1870 Eugénie de Montijo was Empress of the French, sharing the Second Empire with her husband Napoleon III. The last woman to reign over France, she personifies the allure glimpsed in Winterhalter's portraits and the music of Jacques Offenbach. It was 'eighteen years of self-indulgence, folly and wild gaiety, of love affairs and unbelievable elegance', a survivor w...

Jenny Slate

'Magical' MINDY KALING 'Funny and poignant and beautiful' JOHN MULANEY 'It made me remember I was alive' GEORGE SAUNDERS To see the world through Jenny Slate's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gases that are sc...

The Secret Barrister

Could the courts really order the death of your innocent baby? Was there an illegal immigrant who couldn't be deported because he had a pet cat? Are unelected judges truly enemies of the people? Most of us think the law is only relevant to criminals, if we even think of it at all. But the law touches every area of our lives: from intimate family matters to the biggest issues i...

Carly Simon

A chance encounter at a summer party on Martha's Vineyard blossomed into an improbable but enduring friendship. Carly Simon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis made an unlikely pair - Carly, a free and artistic spirit still reeling from her recent divorce, searching for meaning, new love, and an anchor; and Jackie, one of the most celebrated, meticulous, unknowable women in American...

Jim Ottaviani

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was the mathematician credited with cracking the German Enigma code during World War II, enabling the Allies to defeat the Nazis. After the war, Turing went on to launch modern computer science through his creation of the universal Turing machine and the Imitation Game, an artificial-intelligence test that is still in use today. Turing kept his code-brea...

Vikki Warner

A heartfelt coming-of-age memoir about taking the unbeaten path, owning a home, and holding it all--including yourself--together. Detouring from the traditional timeline of marriage-kids-house, twenty-six-year-old Vikki Warner skips straight to homeownership. She buys a downtrodden three-story house in Providence, Rhode Island, and suddenly finds herself responsible for a rotat...

Patti Smith

"Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading."--Suzi Feay, Financial Times "Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing. "--Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist a...

Phil Knight

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands. In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed 50 from his father and created a company with a simple mi...

Philip Gefter

Winner of the Arts Club of Washington Marfield Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection This "admiring and absorbing biography" (Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review) charts Sam Wagstaff's incalculable influence on contemporary art, photography, and gay identity. A legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, Sam Wagstaff was a "figure wh...

Emmanuel Carrère

TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 Limonov is not a fictional character, but he could have been. He's lived a hundred lives. He was a hoodlum in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, punk-poet and valet to a billionaire in Manhattan, fashion writer in Paris, lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the chaos after the fall of communism a chari...

Anya Von Bremzen

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the US...

Jung Chang

In this ground-breaking biography, Jung Chang shows that under Cixi's rule China acquired virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, cars, electricity, telephones, Western medicine, an army and navy with modern weaponry. ...

Anthony Bourdain

After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris ...

Laurence Bergreen

He knew nothing of celestial navigation or of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. He was a self-promoting and ambitious entrepreneur. His maps were a hybrid of fantasy and delusion. When he did make land, he enslaved the populace he found, encouraged genocide, and polluted relations between peoples. He ended his career in near lunacy. But Columbus had one asset that made all th...

Patti Smith

This book presents a portrait of two young artist's ascent - Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, 'Just Kids' begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It intends to serve as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. ...

Nigel Barley

This witty introduction to the life of the social anthropologist describes Barley's experiences in the Cameroons. In his first foray into fieldwork, Barley discovers that the society of the Dowayo people refuses to conform to the rules of his new discipline. ...

Neal Gabler

His classic films illuminated everyone's childhood. The theme parks are on every tourist itinerary. The movie empire is one of Hollywood's biggest. Walt Disney is one of the few men who unquestionably changed our culture. And Neal Gabler is the first author to have had complete access to the Disney Archives, enabling him to write the definitive biography of this remarkable man....

Andre Agassi

He is one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, but from early childhood Andre Agassi hated the game. Now, in his frank and revealing autobiography, Agassi tells the story of a life framed by triumphs, obsession and personal struggles. He is one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court - but from ...

John Healy

John Healy's The Grass Arena describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind. This Penguin Classics edition includes an afterword by Colin MacCabe. In his searing autobiography Healy describes his fifteen years living rough in London without state aid, when begging car...

Malcolm X / Alex Haley

They called him the 'angriest black man in America' . . . Celebrated and vilified the world over for his courageous but bitter fight to gain for millions of black men and women the equality and respect denied them by their white neighbours, Malcolm X inspired as many people in the United States as he caused to fear him. His remarkable autobiography, completed just before his mu...

Robert Service

Malcolm X / Alex Haley

Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X was written in collaboration with Alex Haley, author of Roots, and includes an introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic, in Penguin Modern Classics. From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Musl...

Giorgio Vasari / Matteo Bandello / Paolo Giovio / Sabba Da Castiglione

For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforwar...

Sofia Franklyn

Michael Caine