20 Historical Biography


HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.


- George Bernard Shaw 75664 CHARLES DICKENS -


A LIFE by Claire Tomalin Tomalin’s biography of Dickens presents the extraordinary contradictions of a man who brought a warm glow into every room he entered and yet could be morose and resentful, who was regarded as an arbiter of public morality and yet spent the latter part of his life concealing his relationship with a mistress 27


years his junior. Many of Dickens’s life experiences found their way into his novels, which were avidly read in weekly serial instalments by everyone from the skivvy to the Queen. Dickens spent idyllic childhood years in Chatham where his father worked for the Navy, but when they returned to London, John Dickens, who is regarded as a model for the insolvent Mr Micawber, was sent to the Marshalsea prison for bankruptcy. A kind friend gave Dickens a factory job but the experience was one of humiliation for the young boy, and characters such as Fagin and Smike had their origins in this unhappy period. The young Dickens finally got a job as a journalist which allowed him to marry Catherine Hogarth, but the union was a mistake and he quickly came to feel that they were temperamentally incompatible. Fascinated by the theatre all his life, he chose an actress, Ellen Ternan, as the companion of his mature years. Dickens’s philanthropy was legendary and with the wealthy Angela Burdett Coutts he founded a home for women who were prostitutes or likely to fall into prostitution, rehabilitating them with no suggestion of blame or punishment. 527pp, black and white photos. £30 NOW £8


75676 PROUST’S


OVERCOAT: The True Story by Lorenza Foschini and Eric Karpeles


Researching a television programme on the legendary costume designer Tosi, the author took the opportunity to ask him about his fascination with Proust. This interview led back to the director of a Paris perfume house, Jacques Guerin, who had known


Proust’s brother, the doctor Robert Proust. Robert had inherited some of Marcel’s furniture and clothes, which he showed to Guerin, including the famous otter-lined coat in which the genius kept warm while both writing and sleeping. From that moment Guerin became obsessed with acquiring all the Proust memorabilia he could, worming his way into family funerals under the pretence of being a relative, and cornering anyone he thought might have items to sell. A particular source was an insolent young man, Monsieur Werner, who took over the furniture and clothes on Robert’s death and sadistically teased Guerin with offers of further material. Finally he gave Guerin a prized possession, Proust’s legendary overcoat. Meanwhile Guerin had become embroiled with Robert’s widow about the fate of Proust’s manuscripts, many of them destroyed on account of the family’s embarrassment over Proust’s homosexuality. An absorbing story. 128pp. $19.99 NOW £4


75315 WILKIE COLLINS by Peter Ackroyd CBE The author, a bestselling


biographer, historian and novelist as well as a broadcaster, follows his hero, ‘the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists’, from his childhood as the son of a well- known artist, through his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame, and his life-long friendship with Charles Dickens. Collins was fascinated by the secrets and


crimes - the fraud, blackmail and poisonings - that lay hidden behind the city of London’s respectable façade. He was never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the Establishment head on. As well as his enduring masterpiece The Moonstone, often called the first true detective novel, and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. He was short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, yet he was none-the-less a charmer, loved by children, and irresistibly attractive to women. He never married, but lived for 30 years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted throughout his illness and his opium-taking. 199 sympathetic and humorous pages illustrated in b/w, with list of the major works. £12.99 NOW £6


75179 BLOOD SISTERS: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses


by Sarah Gristwood Exploring what it was like to be a medieval queen here in sensory detail is the ermine cloak, exquisite jewels, Spanish leather, gold cloth and purple velvet. Considered a “cousins’ war” by contemporaries, the series of dynastic conflicts between the Houses of Lancaster


and York that ripped apart the ruling Plantagenet family in the 15th century was, at its heart, a domestic drama, a family feud on a grand scale with the greatest prize of


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all at stake. Gristwood’s contention is that a handful of powerful women were just as decisive in the outcome as the men who fought and died seeking the throne. Seven women are studied in detail, among them Marguerite of Anjou, wife of Lancastrian Henry VI, who effectively ruled the kingdom as her husband went insane; Cecily Neville, the Yorkist matriarch whose son, Edward IV, had his brother George executed in order to maintain power and Margaret Beaufort, who gave up her own claim to the throne in order that her son, Henry Tudor, could become Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty, after defeating Richard III of York at Bosworth. A richly depicted epic of hopeful births, bloody deaths, romance, brutal pragmatism and enough scheming to put even Machiavelli to shame, this is the history that we know told from a viewpoint rarely adopted. 524pp with 16 pages of colour plates. Written by the Oxford scholar. $29.99 NOW £7


75229 PIRATE HUNTER OF THE CARIBBEAN: The Adventurous Life of Captain


Woodes Rogers by David Cordingly With rich and vivid details and plenty of action, one of the world’s foremost experts on pirate history, as well as being the author of the perennial favourite Under the Black Flag, brings us the thrilling story of


the man who fought the real pirates of the Caribbean. Sea captain, privateer and colonial governor, Woodes Rogers was one of the early 18th century’s boldest and most colourful characters. This thrilling book is the definitive account of his incredible life. A fearless adventurer who lost his fortune as often as his temper, he battled scurvy, hurricanes and mutinies - capturing, along the way, a treasure galleon and rescuing the shipwrecked Alexander Selkirk, whose four-year ordeal on a remote Pacific island inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. Woodes Rogers was eventually appointed Governor of the Bahamas where he found himself in charge of a string of islands being plundered by raucous felons from the notorious Blackbeard to female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read who escaped the hangman’s noose only by stating that they were pregnant. An exciting 301 rough cut pages illustrated in colour, 16.5 x 24cm. Small remainder mark. $26 NOW £5


75659 ALICE BEHIND


WONDERLAND by Simon Winchester Alice in Wonderland was an immediate best-seller on its publication in 1865 and has never been out of print. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, created the story for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson was a young lecturer.


Alice went on to a glittering career as a society beauty, linked with one of Queen Victoria’s sons before Victoria hauled him off to an arranged political marriage. Alice ended up with a rich commoner, losing two sons in the Great War. In the 20th century, controversy has raged over the appropriateness of Dodgson’s relationship with the Liddell children. His favourite seems to have been the beautiful young boy Henry, and among the thousands of images he made using the newly-invented collotype process, there are relatively few of Alice herself. But in the most famous photo, showing her half- naked and dressed as a beggar-girl, many people have seen a disturbing knowingness. Winchester argues that Dodgson’s interest in Alice was not sexual but that Alice’s dreamy, intense expression was a response to his skill in talking the subject through the drawn-out process of photography. A beautifully written contribution to Alice studies. 110pp. £16.95 NOW £5


74725 SISTER QUEENS: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile by Julia Fox


Looking through the lens of their Spanish origins, the author reveals these queens as flesh-and-blood women equipped with character, intelligence and conviction. When they were young, the futures of the Sister Queens appeared promising, but the unions for which they had spent their whole lives preparing were fraught with duplicity and betrayal. Juana’s authority was continually usurped by her husband, her father and her son. Katherine, the first queen of King Henry VIII of England, was cruelly tossed aside in favour of his mistress Anne Boleyn. Ousted from the positions of power and influence they had been groomed for, and separated from their children, both Katherine and Juana turned to their rich and abiding faith and deep personal belief in their family’s dynastic legacy, in order to cope with their enduring hardships. 454 pages with plates in colour and b/w, genealogical tables, map. $30 NOW £7


74891 FAITHFUL HANDMAID: Fanny Burney


at the Court of King George III by Hester Davenport


Queen Charlotte is reported to have said to Doctor Burney: ‘O! your daughter is a very extraordinary genius indeed!’ A Mrs Thrale is reputed to have opined: ‘Miss Burney looks so meek, and so quiet - nobody would suspect what a comical Girl she is - but I believe she has a great deal of malice at Heart’. Elsewhere, she was described as ‘the silent, observant Miss Fanny’. Readers will probably deduce from these remarks that the Keeper of the Robes to the Queen was an unusually perceptive and complex woman. Peeping into her letters and journals, readers witness the turbulent goings-on of the King’s reign, the trial of Warren Hastings, the ‘uninterruptedly terrible’ madness of the King and Fanny’s ‘joy amounting to extacy’ (sic) when he finally recovered. Her time at Court is vividly described, as is her personal life, in particular the sad tale of her courtship and jilting by the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Stephen Digby, and her fame as a novelist. 240 pages, illus. £25 NOW £6.50


74556 HENRY JAMES: His


Women and His Art by Lyndall Gordon Henry James’s friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson (great niece of James Fenimore Cooper author of The Last of the Mohicans) ended in 1894 when he tried to drown a boatload of her dresses in a Venetian lagoon. She had fallen to her death three months before. It was an elusive friendship that echoed his mysterious relationship


with Minnie Temple who had died 20 years earlier. The thesis is that the two women’s influence was so profound that they can be seen as partners, even collaborators in his art. Their ties to him were not sexual but imaginative. 40 illus, 528pp, paperback. £14.99 NOW £4


74894 GEORGE


STEPHENSON: A Shire Book by Adrian Jarvis Amongst the most famous engineers of all time, George Stephenson’s ‘rags to riches’ story is a one-of-a-kind. The book covers places to visit, a chronological summary, what George Stephenson was really like and the work of his biographers, later life and retirement, the Liverpool and


Manchester Railway and his early railway projects including the safety lamp or Davy lamp he invented with Sir Humphry Davy. 48pp. Colour and other illus. Paperback.


£5.99 NOW £2.75


74945 CLEOPATRA: The Last Pharaoh by Prudence Jones


We owe much of our knowledge of Cleopatra to her enemy Octavian, the man who had become Rome’s first Emperor Augustus. Cleopatra VII (69-30BC) was the last monarch of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Daughter of Ptolemy XII, she ruled with her two brother-husbands, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV both of whom she had killed, and with her son Ptolemy XV or Caesarion (44-30BC). A master of self-presentation, she was the first to craft for herself an image or to be precise a number of images as a goddess, a political leader, or an alluring and exotic woman. Roman statesmen manipulated her image for their own political ends. Colour illus, 160pp, softback. 9 x 7". $17.95 NOW £4


74962 HENRY: The Prince Who Would Turn Tyrant by David Starkey


Larger than life in every sense, Henry VIII was Britain’s most absolute monarch. Yet he was not born to rule. A Renaissance man of exceeding musical, intellectual and athletic talent, the young king’s promising reign transformed into a quest for fame as obsessive as that of any modern celebrity. His search for glory and yearning for a male heir drove Henry into dangerous territory. A fresh-faced Henry stars in this bright, colloquial biography, loaded with anecdotes. Photos, some in colour plus an exclusive interview with David Starkey on the making of the TV series. 413pp, paperback. £9.99 NOW £6


75094 PITT THE ELDER: Man of War by Edward Pearce


Posterity has invested William Pitt, first earl of Chatham, and Britain’s Prime Minister, with mystique, and has presented him as heroic, a titan, a brilliant statesman and military strategist. Starting with Britain’s momentous victory against the French at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the author scrutinizes Pitt’s reputation. He investigates the extent to which Britain’s victories and imperial advances can actually be credited to him personally, and not to a coalition of commanders, naval administrators and foreign allies. Here too is Pitt the man - vain, ruthless, tortured with physical illness and succumbing to mental collapse. 372 paperback pages, contemporary plates. £12.99 NOW £4.50


75163 QUARREL WITH THE KING: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War by Adam Nicolson


In the 16th and 17th centuries the Pembrokes were the richest family in England, with old blood and new drive, led as much by a succession of extraordinary women as by their fathers, husbands and sons. Nicolson’s book tells the story of the first four earls, their wives, children, estates, tenants and allies, following their high and glamorous trajectory from the 1520s to the 1650s. There had been a simmering power struggle for many years between the Pembrokes, with their great estates to the west of Salisbury, and the Crown. Ambivalent in the extreme, they were at differing and the same times both flag bearers for what was good and honourable in ancient England and time servers in some of the most corrupt courts England has ever known. Eventually, as things came to head in the 1640s, the then Earl of Pembroke had no other choice than to rebel against a monarch whom he felt had betrayed both him and his country. 308pp, colour plates. Paperback, small remainder mark.


$15.99 NOW £4.50 74574 MAID AND THE QUEEN: The Secret


History of Joan of Arc by Nancy Goldstone Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who heard the voices of angels telling her to raise an army and go to the aid of the Dauphin, astonished her contemporaries and continues to intrigue us today. Until now, her relationship with Yolande of Aragon, mother-in-law to the Dauphin has been little understood. Here, the author solves the mystery by showing that, if you pry open the Queen’s secrets, you will find the Maid’s. Just when French hopes of restoring the Dauphin to the throne were at their lowest, a young woman arrived, leading an army. But how was she to gain an audience with the King? Was it God’s hand that moved her, or was it also Yolande of Aragon’s? 296 paperback pages, illus, extended genealogy. $16 NOW £6


74727 SOCRATES: A Man


For Our Times by Paul Johnson


Cicero said: ‘Socrates was the first to call Philosophy down from the skies... and force her to investigate ordinary life, ethics, good and evil’. Yet, paradoxically, he left no writing of his own. What we know of his ideas we know from the works of his student Plato and other contemporaries. What these reports tell us is as important today


as it was in 5th century BC. His credo was that how each of us chooses to live and die has great meaning. He devoted his life to learning, because he believed that education was the surest road to happiness. In his later years, as his home city of Athens slid into civic unrest, there was a backlash against him. He was tried and condemned to death, which he faced with great courage. Today we can benefit from his philosophy. 208 pages. $25.95 NOW £6


67858 INTIMATE LETTERS OF ENGLAND’S KINGS by Margaret Saunders


Covering the period in history from the Tudor Dynasty to the House of Hanover, this book was first published in 1959 and is here in facsimile reprint. The specially selected letters show aspects of each Sovereign’s personal character and circumstances perhaps not commonly known. The spelling generally has been updated with modern usage except in the case of the letters of Henry VII where the ancient words and quaint phraseology has been retained. Brief details of each sovereign’s personal history has been included to refresh the reader’s memory. Starting with Henry VII (1457- 1509), ending with William IV (1765-1837), it is an illuminating insight into the lives of 13 kings and includes Henry VIII’s declaration of love to Anne Boleyn and James II’s sarcastic letter to his perfidious son-in-law, William of Orange. Humorous, charming, tragic. Simplified genealogical table, lists of letters. 240pp in large softback, photos. £15.99 NOW £6


74609 CHAMBERS BIOGRAPHICAL


DICTIONARY: 9th Edition edited by Chambers The most comprehensive and authoritative single-volume biographical dictionary available and this new edition has hundreds of new entries, has been extensively revised and updated and gives unrivalled coverage in such areas as fashion, sport, music, radio, TV and film. 300 panel


entries concentrate on people who are of particular interest - Boudicca to Nelson Mandela, Louis XIV, The Sun King to Marilyn Monroe, Isaac Newton to Maya Angelou - the book is packed with fascinating biographies which span the centuries. Fully cross referenced with thousands of suggestions for further reading, there is international and historical coverage of all areas including the arts, science, technology, sport, politics, philosophy and business. 18,000 biographies, with clear headers and easy-to-use layout, small print, 1663pp.


£40 NOW £15


73889 CAESAR: A Life in Western Culture by Maria Wyke


His Caesarian birth, the conquest of Gaul, crossing the Rubicon, his love affair with Cleopatra and foretold death on the Ides of March, in the Middle Ages he was a “pagan saint” and kings, emperors and popes would incorporate him into their family trees. With the Queen of Egypt and his best friend Mark Antony he was one corner of the most famous love triangle in history, the archetypal tale of the interplay of sex, luxury and power, and his increasing power and the manner of his death has become the watchword for explorations of ambition, tyranny, liberty and betrayal. A reflective account of how political and historical imagination works using one of Ancient Rome’s most important characters. Illus, 287pp. £18.99 NOW £5


73930 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by Adrian Goldsworthy


Here, a distinguished historian transcends myth to create a nuanced portrayal of the pair who placed politics and ideology at the heart of their turbulent and intensely erotic relationship. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian but a Greek, and her rule was contingent on Roman support. It was Rome that dominated the world and Antony was an aristocrat who implicitly believed that it was his birthright to lead the Republic. His own propaganda styled him as a great soldier, but the truth was that he spent very little time with the army and displayed only a modest talent. Yet their earlier lives were every bit as thrilling. 470 turbulent pages, colour photos, family trees, maps. $35 NOW £4


74742 JANE AUSTEN: A Celebration of her Life and Work by Lauren Nixon


This beautiful and informative book brings together aspects of her life, work and lasting legacy. There are synopses and detailed character portraits of all Jane Austen’s works, and the people and places that inspired her, including a description of each of the houses she lived in. Included is a carefully chosen selection of her personal correspondence although, sadly, it is known that her sister destroyed a great many letters. To emphasize Jane Austen’s lasting impact on literature today, her ongoing popularity in film and television is discussed. The glorious colour images and photographs on every page capture the fashions, the romance, the classic styles and the nuances of the Regency period, and include the elegant illustrations of Charles E. Brock and Hugh Thomson as well as a watercolour study of Jane sitting on a grassy bank, painted by her sister Cassandra in 1804. 240 pages 30.5cm x 23cm, colour and b/w, timelines, family trees. £20 NOW £7.50


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