"From one of our finest literary biographers comes a brilliant biography of Roald Dahl: the much-loved author and creator of countless iconic literary characters. Roald Dahl was one of the world's greatest storytellers. He conceived his vocation as that of any fearless explorer and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child's viewpoint throughout his life. He crafted tales that were exotic in scenario, frequently invested with a...

How does a story begin? Sometimes it begins with a dream, and a dreamer. Mary is one such dreamer, a little girl who learns to read by tracing the letters on the tombstone of her famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose only escape from her strict father and overbearing stepmother is through the stories she reads and imagines. Unhappy at home, she seeks independence, and at the age of sixteen runs away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,...

"On the fiftieth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh's death, here is a completely fresh view of one of the most gifted--and fascinating--writers of our time Graham Greene hailed Evelyn Waugh as "the greatest novelist of my generation," and in recent years Waugh's reputation has only grown. Now, half a century after Waugh's death in 1966, Philip Eade has delivered a hugely entertaining biography that is both authoritative and full of new information, some...

Biographer Joanne Drayton explores the life and work of crime writer Anne Perry, who started life as Juliet Hulme, the New Zealand teenager jointly convicted of murdering her friend's mother. "In 1994, director Peter Jackson released the movie Heavenly Creatures, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed in New Zealand by two teenage girls embroiled in an obsessive relationship. The movie launched Jackson's international career. It also forever...

A Rona Parish mystery - Writing an article on old family businesses, Rona Parish contacts Curzon, local manufacturers of fine bone china, when she learns they're launching a spectacular new line. Little does she realize that she will directly precipitate a terrible tragedy, a tragedy whose roots stretch back to George Curzon, son of the firm's founder and known to his contemporaries as the Rogue in Porcelain .

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring...