Memoir & biography Books 119 results

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...

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...

Babur

A lost inheritance, a rags-to-riches journey from vagabondage in the mountains of central Asia to an imperial throne in India, warrior-poet Babur's life was one of adventure and endurance against the odds. Descended from both Genghis Khan and Timur, Babur came to the throne of a small principality at the age of eleven; ten years of warfare later, he would lose it for ever to Uz...

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...

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...

Sylvia Plath

The Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of the journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering h...

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 ...

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...

Robert Service

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...

Michael Caine

Sarah Wynn-Williams

Bill Gates

Bill Gates is one of the most transformative figures of our age. In Source Code he takes us back to his beginnings. He describes with candour his childhood in Seattle, the centrality of family - his close relationship with his card-playing grandmother and his demanding but caring parents - his struggles to fit in, his rebelliousness, his first deep friendships and the impact of...

Henry David Thoreau

Jesmyn Ward

Elizabeth Beller

A NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, and USA TODAY BESTSELLER This "intimate and sympathetic portrait of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy that is as enthralling as she was" (Dana Thomas, New York Times bestselling author) reexamines her life and legacy as never before. Perfect for fans of My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy, What Remains, and Fairy Tale Interrupted. A quarter of a century aft...

Graeme Thomson