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About this catalogue
Welcome to our new catalogue. If people’s lives take many forms, imposed by circumstances and events, or the individual’s choices, addictions and ambitions, as well as chance, and sometimes the determination to forge a personal destiny, does it follow that the record of those lives be allowed the same diversity of forms? We invite you to stretch your interpretation of biography to include a book secretly produced for a birthday party, the proceedings of a single night in Chelsea in 1934, one hundred and twenty-three passages each beginning with the same two words, as well as the familiar forms of memoir, autobiography, letters, diaries and journals, biography - critical, authorised and not, comprehensive, impressionistic - or from a mosaic of contributors, as well as those subjects who have successfully disappeared, a smaller group whose illnesses defined them, and others where the individual is presented via a single emotion, mostly friendship, some trusting to memory, one relying on ‘intricate and contradictory detail’, another who, according to her notebooks, “…am me, and I hope to become me more and more” and an influential example where the author’s pursuit of his subject takes over the book.
London: Bodley Head. First English edition, 1968.
A memoir circling the idea of 'there is nothing like the power of the dead among the living' and specifically, in this case, between a father and son.
Very good in dustwrapper.
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New York: George Braziller. First American edition, 1975.
Roger Ackerley's daughter's version of an unusual childhood, told in the gripping style of detective genre, also shines a light on the love story behind one of Ackerley's families.
Fine in near fine dustwrapper with a nick at the crown of the spine.
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New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. First American edition, 1999.
Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin's meeting on a November evening in Leningrad in 1945 lasted 15 hours and had a huge effect on the two protagonists' subsequent lives. Akhmatova was declared an enemy of the state and persecuted. She believed that between them they had started the Cold War. Gyorgy Dalos argues she was right.
Review copy with publisher's promotional material laid in. Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. First English edition, 2005.
Poet, novelist and translator Elaine Feinstein draws on newly available material, covering the years Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's work was banned, her opposition to Stalin, and her determination to continue writing to give voice to the Russian people.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Gramercy Press. First American edition, 1995.
Published just a year after Louisa May Alcott's death in 1888, these journals and letters, plaited together and with linking chronological passages, include Alcott's first poem written at the age of eight, and poems from her mother and father, who encouraged the importance of writing.
Written, compiled and edited by Ednah D. Cheney
Fine in dustwrapper a little sunned on the spine.
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Manchester: Manchester University Press. First English edition, 1995.
Both pioneers of modern literature, Richard Aldington and Hilda Dolittle, often separated by distance or divorce, wrote to each other about their work and feelings for each other. Caroline Zilboorg offers an intimate portrait of one of last century's most fascinating literary couples, from the later years c1930-1960.
Owner signature else fine in very good dustwrapper sunned adjacent to the spine of the rear panel.
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New York: Allen Lane. First English edition, 1973.
Thirty-two tumultuous years in Ancient Greece and its surrounds.
Edgewear and Sscattered foxing to extremities, very good in fine dustwrapper
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London: Atlantic Books. First English edition, 2011.
'Dante in Love' is a very personal journey through Dante Alighieri's intellectual life in Medieval Florence. It explains the imagery of 'Divine Comedy' and Dante's 'relationship' with Beatrice Poltinari.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Lipper / Viking. Reprint, 1999.
Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, is not just the patron saint of printers and theologians, but also brewers. Pulitzer prize-winner Garry Wills contemplates the life and thoughts of one of the most influential Christian philosophers, challenging long-held misconceptions and presenting his subject with candour and empathy.
Fine in dustwrapper with a faint mark on the rear panel.
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New York: Viking. First American edition, 1995.
Although the very private Djuna Barnes called herself 'a most famous unknown', writers like Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot considered her a genius.
Phillip Herring illuminates all parts of Barnes's life and work, and looks closely at her best known work 'Nightwood', a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Harcourt Brace and World. First American edition, 1969.
A well trod 20th century path from childhood in Tsarist Russia to exile in Berlin, Paris and, finally, the United States. Nina Berberova's memoir tells the stories of malaise of life in exile, including portraits of Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrey Bely. Clive James has called this work 'the best single book written about Russian culture in exile'.
Shadows of tape bleed on prelims, very good in dustwrapper.
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New York: W.W. Norton. First American edition, 1983.
Mary Berenson's beautifully written letters see her leave behind a dissatisfying marriage to live in Italy with Bernard Berenson, the foremost expert of his time in Italian Renaissance Art. She herself becomes an authority on art history, influencing American collectors during the first decade of the twentieth century. Her letters reveal a portrait of an age through the relationships forged at Villa I Tatti, the family home in Florence. Edited by Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels
Fine in very good dustwrapper.
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New York: New York Zoetrope. First American edition, 1986.
A song, graphics, letters, unfamiliar photographs, essays, including three by Louise Brooks, as well as by Lotte H. Eisner, Roland Jaccard, Andre Laudeand Tahar Ben Jeeloun, together with the largest single collection of personal photographs, show all sides of the legendary actress who rebelled against the idolatry of Hollywood to preserve her independence and her individuality.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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New York: W.W. Norton. Reprint, 1998.
The umpteenth biography of scholar and adventurer, Richard Burton who translated the erotic classic 'Kama Sutra', 'The Perfumed Garden' and 'The Arabian Nights'; however, this is the first where Isabel Burton is given equal status to her husband.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Neville Spearman. First English edition, 1961.
Martha Jane Canary, aka Calamity Jane, the toughest 'Gal' in the Wild West, 1870-1890, is famous as the legendary hard-drinking frontier woman. Glenn Clairmonte digs beyond the myth to reveal her broken marriage, love for Wild Bill Hickok and just how much it dominated her life.
Owner signature, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: John Murray. First English edition, 1989.
The first full length biography of Dora Carrington revives her reputation as an artist and more than just a satellite member of the Bloomsbury Group, and devotee of Lytton Strachey. It unravels the relationships and events leading up to her suicide on the morning of 11 March 1932.
Carrington's doodles, sketches and drawings are scattered throughout.
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Ecco. First American edition, 2009.
Cheeta, from the Tarzan movies, aided by his secretary James Lever, dishes the dirt on the Golden Age of Hollywood. This famous astute chimp saw plenty of action on set and behind the scenes and does not hold back.
This autobiography was published the previous year 'in slightly different form' by Fourth Estate, London. Perhaps some of Cheeta's insights were too tempting for American lawyers.
Scandal, name-dropping and gossip are touchingly countered by Cheeta's love for Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan - by far the best friend Cheeta ever had.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Sheed and Ward. First English edition, 1935.
St Peter Claver, Jesuit priest, and “slave of the slaves”, spent 40 years among the human cargo as it arrived in Cartegna, Colombia during the seventeeth century, greeting slaves with biscuits, brandy, tobacco and lemons. He tended to the lashed and dying in the holds and carried the sick ashore in his arms. And he absolved penniless negro women ahead of Spanish ladies.
The first part of this book outlines St Peter Claver's methods of conversion, the second discusses questions arising from his methods, the Catholic attitude to slavery and the nature of "practical Christianity".
Edgewear, else very good in dustwrapper darkened on the spine and chipped at edges.
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McMinnville, OR: Booktryst. First American edition, 2019.
Sixteen pieces about the American bookseller and, later, hotelier; contributors include Bettina Hubby, Peter Kraus, Johan Kugelberg, Joel Silver, Gina Stepaniuk and Barry Humphries.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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London: Secker and Warburg. First English edition, 2003.
Dora Diamant, with Franz Kafka the year before his death and then embroiled in the war and politics of the first half of the twentieth century, is revealed in this biography, 15 years in the making.
Kathi Diamant (not related) obtained material from the Comintern and Gestapo archives to tell Diamant's story against the cultural and political backdrop of twentieth century Europe.
Originally buried in an unmarked grave, her family added a tombstone in 1999 that says:'Who knows Dora knows what love is.'
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper
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Normal, ILL: Dalkey Archive Press. First American edition, 1994.
'I would like to see someone write about me the way I write. Such a book would include everything at once,' Marguerite Duras once said. Alain Vircondelet meets her wish, purposely emulating Duras's own style of prose, and writing in the present tense.
This first full length biography separates fact from fiction, from her birth in colonial Indochina, the intellectual skirmishes of the 1950s, the leftist movements of the 1960s, and the signing of Manifesto 343 in 1971 to say she'd had an abortion.
Stamped 'Review Copy' on the half-title page, top edge dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 2007.
Ralph Ellison's reputation spans the spectrum from prophet and cultural hero, to an Uncle Tom who betrayed his race, as well as for having the longest and most publicised writer's block in history. Arnold Rampersand's biography of the Afro-American author of 'Invisible Man', tells how Ellison came to write his masterpiece and how he struggled to write another. Access to previously unpublished papers and letters reveal Ellison's inner life and the sense of failure and insecurity he felt towards the end of his life.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Thames and Hudson. First English edition, 1995.
Best known for his "pure documentary" photography for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, American Walker Evans profoundly influenced generations of photographers. Although his work spoke of social injustice, in his personal life he behaved like a privileged aristocrat. Rathbone reveals these contradictions and his obsession with Americana alongside 24 pages of black and white photography.
Top edge dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Duckworth. First English edition, 1977.
Substantial pieces by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, Vyvyan Holland, Augustus John, Osbert Sitwell and Lord Berners, others by Grant Richards, Harold Nicolson, Thomas J. Firbank on "Uncle Ronald", and Nancy Cunard; and eight critical pieces written between 1924 and 1967 by, among others, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Wilson; 30+ pieces in all.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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San Francisco: HarperCollins. First American edition, 2004.
Was it real or a hoax? First, the Fox sisters claimed to be in touch with spirits through seances, then they denied it, only later to reaffirm their faith in the spirit world. This book dispels much of the mystery in this late nineteenth century suspense story.
Helped along by photographic content, this book confirms that there's nothing more powerful than the presence of the dead among the living.
But a warning – not to be read after dark.
Owner stamp, else fine in dustwrapper
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Washington, DC: Counterpoint. First American edition, 2000.
New Zealand writer Janet Frame and her sisters 'held the silk purses of words' but were a family steeped in tragedy. The first part of Michael King's biography is about Frame's troubled family life, narrow escape from a lobotomy, and early career. The second half is devoted to her life following success. It calls into serious question the way in which society defines normality and mental health. Known for her reticence, Frame made her personal papers available for this biography.
There are endorsements from Doris Lessing, Michael Holroyd and Geoffrey Moorhouse on the rear panel of the dustwrapper.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Sydney: Ure Smith. First Australian edition, [1946].
Selections from fourteen volumes of diaries, with illustrations by Donald Friend, bear witness to his deep frustration with the boredom of Brisbane camp life – 'a stupid khaki hell' – where he was a gunner during the war years.
The book is generously illustrated with Friend's character drawings in line, pen and pencil.
Tucked inside this book is a small nugget – an inserted newspaper clipping from the Melbourne 'Age' in 1946 where a critic bemoans, 'Excellent art book, almost ruined by vapid prose scribblings'.
Very good in good dustwrapper chipped along edges and missing a small piece from the crown of the spine.
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New York: St Martins Press. Reprint, 2006.
Ava Gardner's rags to riches story of successes and excesses generates far more excitement than her film roles.
It is said Ernest Hemingway saved one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento and that she knocked Howard Hughes's teeth out.
Discovered in Carolina, Gardner became a screen goddess and uninhibited star who famously married Frank Sinatra. Server leaves no stone unturned.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London and New Haven: Quartet. First English editions. Yale University Press. First American edition, 1988-1993.
'The faithful dog of my soul', according to the author, or three volumes of autobiography covering the second half of Witold Gombrowicz’s life in Argentina, a small part of his life in Germany and France after his return to Europe in 1963, and bits and pieces of Poland which he left in 1939, never to return. Together with a separately published collection of autobiographical sketches of his childhood, youth, early literary career and colleagues, written for Radio Free Europe while living in Argentina through the late 1950s.
All fine in dustwrappers. The four vols.
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London: Quartet Books. First English editions, 1989.
Two volumes: 'Forbidden Territory, 1931-1956' and 'Realms of Strife, 1957-1982' begin in Barcelona, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo's birthplace, where his family cheered on Franco and supported the Nazis.
He explains how political, sexual and social repression shaped him as a writer, his time as an expat living in Paris, how he came to terms with his homosexuality, and his ultimate disillusionment with politics.
Translated by Peter Bush.
Fine in dustwrappers. The two volumes
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London: Lorrimer. Reprint, 1969.
Fifty individuals reflect on Che Guevara, contributors include: John Berger, Italo Calvino, Stokely Carmichael, Julio Cortazar, Susan Sontag, Fidel Castro, Graham Greene, Robert Lowell, Frederic Raphael, Oz Magazine, Christopher Logue,Thomas Merton; 24 pp of plates, and an introductory poem by Cesar Vallejo
Tape shadow from bookseller's sticker on front pastedown, else fine in very good dustwrapper nicked and creased at edges.
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New York: Free Press. First Australian paperback edition, 2007.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of 'The Caged Virgin', begins her life in a traditional Muslim family in Somalia, where she is subjected to circumcision and later a forced marriage. She survives civil war, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four countries under dictatorship, eventually to seek asylum in the Netherlands.
Arguing for the reform of Islam, and the human rights of oppressed Muslim women, especially victims of honour killings, has led to a life under armed guard in the West but also won her an international reputation as a courageous freedom fighter.
Pictorial wrappers. Very good.
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Hanover: University Press of New England. First American edition, 1982.
A long post-war legacy was expected from Humphrey Jennings had he not died accidentally in 1950, while at work, on location. Poet, artist, filmmaker, author of the collage history, 'Pandaemonium 1660-1886: the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers', and co-founder of the Mass Observation movement, 60 years before Google – Jennings has been referred to as the poet of English cinema for his evocative films of the Second World War.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Collins Harvill. First English edition, 1989.
Two women in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1940 made a pact, that whoever survived would bear witness. Milena Jesensky, a journalist, and one-time translator and lover of Franz Kafka, and journalist Marguerite Buber-Neumann, were both arrested for their opposition to Nazism. Only Buber-Neumann survived.
Although the links to Kafka are interesting, it is the bond between the two women and the risks they took for their friendship that make this book so moving.
Owner's stamp, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Sinclair-Stevenson. First English edition, 1992.
Establishing a chronology of Jesus's life via the gospels and cultural and scientific beliefs of the time, A.N. Wilson seeks out the 'real' Jesus, and turns a few popular beliefs on their head.
Tables, diagrams and notes add to the interest.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2001.
Sue Roe's biography of the under-appreciated artist Gwen John, is the second in two decades, indicating a resurgence of interest.
John is best known for her paintings of a lone woman in a nearly bare setting. In her private life she was a secret lover of French sculptor Rodin.
The book has 16 pages of images.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Bloomsbury. First English paperback edition, [1998].
Frida Kahlo's illustrated journal for 1944-1954, the last ten years of her life, is printed as a full-colour facsimile edition – a very special publishing event. Seventy watercolours, sketches and self-portraits are complemented by Kahlo's text entries, each followed by translation and commentary. Her childhood, politics, relationship with Diego Rivera, and courage facing more than thirty-five operations to correct injuries from an earlier accident, find expression in her unique and powerful vision.
Introduction by novelist Carlos Fuentes, with commentary by Sarah Lowe.
Pictorial wrappers. Near fine.
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New York: Grove Weidenfeld. First American edition, 1990.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, art dealer extraordinaire, and Picasso's ambassador to the outside world, championed avant-garde cubist artists before they were in fashion.
This first full-length biography examines his relationships with the artists he fostered, his struggle against political forces that led to exile and being stripped of his art holdings – setbacks he overcame to remain the most uncompromising art dealer of his day.
Extremities foxed, very good in dustwrapper
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London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1993.
For years the dust jackets of Philip Larkin's books revealed little and all his personal documents were destroyed on his death. His damaging fall from grace as a misogynist, racist and porn addict, saw some libraries remove him from their shelves. Close friend and former poet laureate, Andrew Motion raises questions about the separation between life and work, and argues that the poems will survive whatever Larkin's reputation.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Bantam Press. Reprint, 1999.
At the height of his fame, Scot John Law was the French Controller General of Finance, the so-called father of finance, and the man who dreamed up paper money and the credit economy. The rest of the time he was a gambler living off his winnings, eloping with another's man's wife, and escaping to Amsterdam, to narrowly avoid execution for killing a man in a duel.
Law's trajectory set the scene for our own contemporary boom-to-bust economy. In the teeth of opposition from powerful vested interests, Law won backing to set up the first French bank in 1716 to issue paper currency. He created a trading company that made its shareholders so wealthy that a new term - millionaires - was coined to describe them. But when the bubble burst and speculation gave way to panic, he fled to Venice with his creditors at his heels, and died there a poor man.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1964.
Memoir begun in 1935, unfinished at her death in 1956; edited by E.W. Tedlock Jr (128pp); followed by c.200 letters written between 1890 and 1956, and twelve essays and reviews by Frieda Lawrence; illustrated, chronology and index, c.500pp. Typography, binding and dustwrapper unmistakably by George Salter.
Owner signature on front pastedown, else fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Carroll and Graf. First American edition, 2000.
Doris Lessing has been described as a hard nut to crack. In her own autobiography she warns, 'You will never get access here. You can't, this is the ultimate and inviolable privacy'.
With five biographies pending at the time, Carole Klein got in first. She reveals a woman continually reinventing herself, including embracing communism and feminism only to later discard them. The nut cracking makes it a little brittle and the overall tone is unsympathetic for a writer who was so keen to take on the task.
Remainder mark bottom edge, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: The Women's Press. First English edition, 2001.
From Columbus, Georgia, Carson McCullers invented the term 'American loneliness' with her first novel 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter'. Just 23, she was part of a generation of enfants terribles from the South, hanging out with Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.
Translated from the French, this biography by 'Le Monde' journalist Josyanne Savigneau puts forward polarising views of McCullers's personality, her illnesses, and her identity as an American outsider.
Savigneau's passionate style is a good match for her controversial subject.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 1991.
New Zealander Ngaio Marsh wrote more than 30 detective novels between 1934 and 1982, the year of her death. Nearly all reference Shakespearean plays and are laced with humour and bloodthirsty murder.
Margaret Lewis provides a good smattering of Kiwi history to help readers understand where and how Marsh grew up, and reveals the source of inspiration for each of her books.
Extremities evenly tanned, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Butterworth. First English edition, 1929.
One of the 'Notable British Trials' series – the trial of John Donald Merrett who murdered his mother and was released on a 'Not Proven' verdict from the jury – is edited by the wonderful William Roughead, a trailblazer of the true crime genre.
Original blue cloth. Faint owner stamp, rear cover a little wrinkled; foldout map of the scene of the crime intact at rear. Very good. No dustwrapper.
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London: Collins. First English edition, 1984.
Setting the record straight on 'far and away the best living poet who will be read when others are forgotten' (Thomas Hardy); and also, according to this biographer, a prisoner of a 'self-tormenting, self-doubting temperament, over anxious to give, but too nervous to receive.'
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. First American edition, 1977.
After 'Flying': if loving one person is good, loving two will be twice as good and onto an obsession; signed by Kate Millett.
Fine in dustwrapper after an illustration by the author in 1995.
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New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1971.
'His world as composed' by the author, jazz bass player Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is light on musical works but heavy on sexual exploits and pimping.
Told in a stream of consciousness macho voice, it does however give a perspective on race and growing up black in America.
Edited by Nel King.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press. First English edition, 2015.
Arriving in Qatar in 1959 as the ambassador's wife, who 'knows everything, hears secrets, witnesses duplicity, but is not allowed to express an opinion', Patricia Moberly, at the age of 93, finally speaks plainly.
She shares her observations on the lives of women at the time, tradition and change, as well as the Intensive Care Unit she and her husband established in Gaza, and other medical aid programs.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine. 200 copies.
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New York: Taplinger Publishing. First American edition, 1983.
After decades of near oblivion, Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose life was cut short in 1907 at age 31, came to be regarded as one of the most important of the early German modernist painters.
She was the first woman to paint self-nudes and created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art.
Journals and letters for the years 1892-1907, edited by Gunter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken, capture the changes of early twentieth century Europe and provide a guide to the art capitals of Berlin, London and Paris as seen through Modersohn-Becker's eyes.
Illustrated with reproductions of the artist's work.
Fine in dustwrapper a little sunned on the spine.
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New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. First American edition, 1976.
In 1920s Paris, Adrienne Monnier's bookstore La Maison des Amis des Libres, was legendary for its author readings and nurturing the careers of writers like Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Not just a bookseller but an essayist, translator, partner of Sylvia Beach, and a central individual in literary life in Paris from 1915 until the early 1950s, Monnier's credits include publishing the French translation of 'Ulysses' after it had been banned in England and America.
The translation, introduction, and notes are by Richard McDougall.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2003.
The third Mitford daughter, Lady Diana Mosley (1910-2003), discredited herself to become known as 'that woman' who left her husband for Oswald Mosley, head of the British Fascist Party, and for making a close friend of Hitler, remaining unrepentant and defending him until her death.
Descriptions of conditions in wartime prisons where Mosley was interned and the rise of political extremism in the 1930s add historical value but ultimately nothing redeems Mosley in her choice of allegiance and denial of the Holocaust. At her request, the book was not published until after her death in 2003.
Scattered foxing to top edge, owner signature, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Short Books. First English edition, 2010.
Iris Murdoch's letters to Frank Thompson and David Hicks during World War Two, interspersed with extracts from her journals, are published for the first time as part of editor Peter J. Conradi's campaign to rectify Murdoch's two-dimensional portrayal in her widower's memoirs and the film 'Iris'.
Edited and introduced by Peter J. Conradi.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Freundlich Books. First American edition, 1986.
The grainy baritone voice and plain prose of Edward R. Murrow are associated with journalistic integrity in broadcasting folklore.
A.M. Sperber pulls together twelve years of research, including FBI files on Murrow, from the Depression as the American radio correspondent of his generation, his broadcasts from London during World War Two, a CBS director during the McCarthy era and, much later, protagonist of 'Good Night and Good Luck', a movie about the latter period.
Sperber raises questions which lie at the heart of the current debate over the role of news in American public life.
Illustrated and indexed.
Fine in dustwrapper
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Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. First American edition, 2007.
In the life of Eadweard Muybridge, science meets foul murder, stop-motion photography meets courtroom drama. As a pioneer Victorian photographer, Muybridge is the father of the motion picture, largely overlooked by history – but this biography changes that.
He lived the second half of his life as the murderer of his wife's lover, acquitted after arguing his own insanity, and narrowly avoiding hanging.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Constable. First English edition, 1988.
The New Romantics: nine English artists working before, during, and after World War Two shared no singular style except their work came to exemplify the confused wartime period. Eight pages of colour plates and 100+ black and white reproductions, chronology for 1930-1956.
Fine in dustwrapper
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New York: Bloomsbury. First American edition, 2004.
'Pablo Neruda was the King Midas of language. Everything he touched became poetry,' observed Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes.
Published to coincide with the centenary of Neruda's birth, 'A Passion for Life' is the first full portrait of the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, best known for 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair'.
Adam Feinstein shows Neruda the romantic lyricist become Neruda the exposer of social injustices, living underground for a year before fleeing Chile in a dramatic escape across the Andes into exile. But alongside the humanity of his work, Feinstein also shows Neruda's political fault lines and romantic betrayals that caused hurt to the women in his life.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Chatto and Windus. First English edition, 2005.
Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, 'The Orientalist' traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942), a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince, and later a best-selling author in Nazi Germany.
Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, letters and diaries to piece together a life entirely built on subterfuge, to end up with an adventure story that explores some of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century.
Slight lean, else fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: W.W. Norton. First American edition, 2004.
'Elegance shares a border with crankiness, independence with selfishness' – 'The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe'.
Best known for her sensual close-ups of flowers, desert landscapes, and bleached white cow skulls, as well as Santa Fe chic, Georgia O'Keefe is also remembered for her celebrated relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Although he marketed her art and broadened her audience, this biography reveals how he in fact hindered her abstract painting. This book goes beyond the marketing by Stieglitz and separates the sales pitch from the true intent of a remarkable artist.
Contains colour reproductions of O'Keeffe's work.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Eland. Reissue, 1988.
A well-off family's decline into poverty takes place against the backdrop of the last days of the Ottoman Empire. This powerful anti-war book tells the 'other side' of the Gallipoli story. It describes how ordinary people closed the door on the Ottoman Empire to embrace the new Republic – and what they lost along the way.
First published in 1950, the afterword to this edition is by Ates Orga, Orga's son.
Pictorial wrappers. Very good.
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New York: St Martin's Press. Reprint, 1995.
The life of Eva Peron, the wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, is shrouded in mystery, distortion and rumours. She is everything from saint to despot. This book analyses what is reality, what is folkore.
With access to newly declassified archives of the Peron government, Alicia Ortiz uncovers new information, including Juan Peron's connections to the Nazi Party.
Personal testimonies from people such as Father Benitez, Peron's personal confessor, and testimonies from associates, help explain some of Peron's controversial behaviour and the truth behind the legend.
Bump on corner of front board adjacent to spine, else fine in very good dustwrapper with a mark on the reverse.
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London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 2000.
An exact transcription of the 23 journals and journal fragments held by Smith College, Massachusetts, written by Sylvia Plath between the ages of eighteen and thirty, illuminate her student years, marriage to fellow writer Ted Hughes, and two years of living and working in New England.
It includes the full text of the two journals which Ted Hughes unsealed just before his death in 1998.
Edited and annotated by Karen V. Kukil.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Bridgewater Press. First English edition, 1999.
A birthday book for a poet - 'Paeans for Peter Porter' was a secret production of a celebration for Porter on his 70th birthday by 20 of his friends.
Contributors include: Julian Barnes, Les Murray, David Malouf, Martin Amis, Barry Humphries, Wendy Cope, Clive James and thirteen others.
'...God bless a man who had so much to show us,
We should thank God he found the time to know us,' wrote Clive James.
'...Master poet, Peter, you're this rock
tickled by roses in their climb;
you're our blue-edged flag, our fore-runner
first off the adzed blocks of home...,' wrote Les Murray.
One of 75 copies (total edition 113), this one unnumbered and marked 'contributor's copy'.
Original grey green cloth. Fine as issued without dustwrapper.
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York, UK: Stone Trough Books. First English edition, 2015.
With Pryce-Jones between the Wars in the Middle East, Greece, South and Central America, as well as the English country house circuit; beginning his journal at Victoria Station, London at 10 in the morning of 17th September 1926' on the way to Paris. Illustrated; edited by John Byrne, with an introduction by David Pryce-Jones, the author's son.
Fine in dustwrapper. 500 copies.
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St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. First Australian edition, 2000.
Uncensored papers, previously unavailable to biographers, provide fresh evidence of Rasputin, the Siberian 'holy peasant' who had such power over the Russian tsarina and whose malign influence helped lead to the downfall of the Romanovs. Eyewitness accounts from the official enquiry into Rasputin shed more light on his sensational murder.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Andre Deutsch. First English edition, 1979.
'An unfinished autobiography' sets the record straight over the author's hurt that people judged her as a drifter, and for her 'vagabondage'.
Part 1: her childhood as a white Creole in the West indies; Part 2: 'It Began to Grow Cold' is her life in England.
Despite a resurgence of interest in 'Wild Sargasso Sea', after being forgotten for 20 years, Rhys hit tough times, none of which is sugar-coated in these short vignettes.
Foreword by Diana Athill, with her own biographical sketch.
Owner signature, top edge dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1985.
An Italian-born Jesuit missionary abroad in the later 16th and early 17th centuries: first in India, then China, a celebrity priest, and the first foreigner invitee into the Forbidden City.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Grove Press. First American edition, 1993.
The life of modernist poet Laura Riding (1901-1991), has drawn sharply divided opinion about her merits. Many have dismissed her as a domineering nutcase.
Although the core of 'In Extremis' is Riding's 14-year relationship with Robert Graves, it refutes the sexist assumption of early historians that Graves must have been the main force in their collaboration.
Despite being hostile towards Deborah Baker's biography and opposing publication, Riding is vindicated because, instead of her weird behaviour, it is her belief in poetry as the medium for truth-telling that resonates.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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[London]: Folio Society. First edition thus, 1952.
'An experiment in biography' – part biography, part detective story, is the author's third biography where the research and writing are as much the subject as Frederick Rolfe's life story as a failed priest, who ended his days in a Venice slum.
Introduction by Sir Norman Birkett, 'A Memoir' by Sir Shane Leslie; first published in 1934.
Illustrated with photographs and facsimiles.
Scattered foxing to prelims and extremities. Very good in dustwrapper.
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New York: Harper and Row. First American edition, 1980.
Growing up with the movies in Florence, Alabama, and committing to the relationship in New York, Paris and London as a film critic; illustrated
Very good in dustwrapper with a couple of tears at the top of the rear panel.
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London: Victor Gollancz. First English edition, 1952.
Standing on the bridge of the 'The New Yorker' with its captain/editor and glimpses of the crew below, Kramer exposes the nitty gritty reality that 'Rough house Ross' is in fact not the genteel sophisticate everyone expects, and his employees are slumming it amidst the chaos of the magazine's early days.
Good in dustwrapper.
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London: Atlas Press. First English edition, 2001.
The life of the most eccentric of French, or any country's, writers, illustrated; translated by Ian Monk; author and translator both members of OULIPO.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine.
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London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First English edition, 1969.
Award-winning biographer, Victoria Glendinning writes about her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, born into a Quaker family in Victorian England, who must fight for an education.
Despite a stifling family, Winnie made it to Cambridge where she was a pioneering bluestocking until illness ended her life aged only 22.
Victoria Glendinning's first book, inscribed by her to Frank Collieson, Cambridge bookseller, and with autographed letters, signed from her to Collieson (1979, 1980) and a separate letter to the bookseller from Jane Ransom thanking him for finding a copy of this book and her thoughts on it.
Fine in very good dustwrapper rubbed on front and rear panels and creased along edges.
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London: Chatto and Windus. First English editions, 1988-1992.
Fifteen years in the making – five volumes, the complete set reveal every aspect of Bernard Shaw as playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian, and more. Three volumes of biography, 'The Last Laugh' (vol.4) Shaw's descendants legal wranglings after his death and the 'Complete Notes and Cumulative Index' (vol. 5).
The five volumes all near fine or better in dustwrappers. The five volumes
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New York: The Bookman Press. First American edition, 1998.
'Forgotten Kings' is an account of James Salter's first meeting and dealings with writer Irwin Shaw, taken from Salter's memoir 'Burning the Days', and ending with Shaw's illness and death.
'I touched his hair, something I had never done in life. It was like my own, curly, gray. I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it... He was much to me, father, great force, friend. He lived a life superior to mine, a life I envied and could barely fathom, his courage, loves, embrace, were all so large. We lived, I felt, in their shadow..'.
#177/200 numbered copies designed by Jerry Kelly and printed at the Stinehour Press.
Plain wrappers. Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: American Book Collector, 1980.
'So many people have asked me why I sold my rare book business that I have learned to reply succinctly - 'the pressure',' says rare book dealer George Sims. And what pressure it is!
The day begins at 6am, with high level appointments including the Prime Minister, lunch (caviar) with a Duke, a great deal more influence-wielding before Doris Day calls to sing him to sleep.
Single sheet measuring 36 x 26cms., printed both sides, then folded twice for posting. Very good.
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London: Faber and Faber. First English edition, 1991.
Inherited wealth, related fame and acquaintances, Cold War espionage, 'Grand Street', his father, multiple sclerosis: life as a ferocious comedy according to Ben Sonnenberg, who said autobiography was an 'unruly art'...and 'more autoerotic than I knew before I began....'
Amidst all the posing and youthful riot that explodes into 'anarchy and sabotage', comes his real achievement – becoming founding editor of one of the important journals of our time.
Foxing to extremities, very good in dustwrapper.
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New York: Alfred A. Knopf. First American edition, 1992.
From her childhood in Colorado, through the twists and turns of American Literature during the mid twentieth century, Jean Stafford is worth remembering, if nothing else, as the author of 'The Mountain Lion'.
Her stories with titles like 'Children Are Bored on Sunday' were published in 'The New Yorker' and honoured in 1970 with a Pulitzer Prize.
Stafford's disenchanted vision started with her father's loss of fortune and growing up in a boarding house. After joining the Southern Critics, she married poet Robert Lovell, struggled with Catholicism, confronted domestic violence, and always and forever, searched for a safe place to be – an interior castle.
Review copy with publisher's slip laid in. Fine in dustwrapper
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Port Melbourne, Vic: William Heinemann. First Australian edition, 1993.
The most comprehensive biography of the Australian novelist Christina Stead is as nomadic and cosmopolitan as its subject.
Stead left parochial Sydney in 1928 at the age of 26 and only returned when she was 72, spending her whole writing life on the other side of the world. From London, she moved to the heady Paris of the 1920s, and later fled McCarthyist New York – a city Stead loved and hated – for Europe. Her novels followed her nomadic life and were regarded as 'un-Australian'.
Most would-be biographers had the door slammed in their face. Rowley stayed the course to do justice to a major novelist and global citizen.
This biography won the National Book Council Award when it was first published in Australia in 1993.
Edgewear, else fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday. First American edition, 2014.
The first complete portrait of artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg, begins in Romania when the Second World War forces him to emigrate to the United States. On a single day, he became a US citizen, an officer in the US Navy and a member of the wartime intelligence agency, sent out to spy in China, North Africa and Italy.
After the war, he returned to his art to become one of 'The New Yorker's' most iconic satirical artists. He shot to fame with his illustration 'View of the World from Ninth Avenue' that served as the magazine's cover in March, 1976.
Author Deirdre Bair is a national Book Award winner.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. First Canadian edition, 1993.
Twenty-nine autobiographical sketches begin with 'Places do not die as people do, but they often change so fundamentally that little is left of what they once were'.
The fragments that make up this memoir – William Trevor's childhood, parent's marriage, Dublin education, rural, small-town life – are vintage Trevor.
There are also short essays on his travels in Venice and Iran and illustrations by Lucy Willis.
Signed by the author.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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Albuquerque, NM: University Of New Mexico Press. First American edition, 1955.
The biography of Doroteo Arango, aka Pancho Villa is the story, as it is told in Mexico, of how a bandit became a self-styled leader of the people's revolution.
Inscribed to Harold and Joy Oliver by the author.
Very good in dustwrapper
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London: Chatto and Windus and The Hogarth Press. First English edition, 1985.
For over 40 years, Valentine Ackland was Sylvia Townsend Warner's companion and closest friend. Also a writer and poet, she left behind this brief autobiographical essay. It is frank regarding her lesbian relationships, and unconsummated marriage, a disappointment redeemed by her love for Sylvia.
Foreword by Bea Howe
Fine in dustwrapper a little sunned on the spine.
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London: Dent. First English editions, 1986.
Two volumes: 'The Early Years 1903-1939' (published 1986) and 'No Abiding City 1939-1966' (1992) form the most detailed account ever published of Evelyn Waugh and his work.
Together, they cover his childhood, years at Oxford, marriage, expeditions to Africa and other places.
Explored in equal measure are his reputation as defender of conservatism, a brilliant clown, and a serious artist with a melancholy heart, who disengaged from the world after 1945.
Both volumes fine in dustwrappers. The two vols.
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London: The British Museum Press. First English edition, 2003.
Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) built up one of the world's largest museum collections – his own Museum of Man – containing over 125,000 both priceless and banal artefacts that span centuries and continents.
Over 500 illustrations and seven essays give an insight into the history of collecting as well as the material culture of health and medicine.
Now scattered across numerous institutions, 'Medicine Man' reunites a mix of objects from the 'forgotten' museum.
Pictorial wrappers. Fine
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London: Fourth Estate. First English edition, 2000.
Fifteen hundred+ letters, written between 1875-1900: from Oxford, London, America, prison, Paris, Berneval, Naples, published on the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death; edited by Martin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, a complete world.
Fine in dustwrapper.
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New York: Columbia University Press. First American edition, 2000.
Eighteenth century pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1792). Her legacy stalled for almost a century while her lifestyle received more harsh judgmental attention than her writing. Yet she inspired Jane Austen and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
With the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality became increasingly important.
Her crowded world of other remarkable women, writers and friends are louder than the voices of her detractors.
Illustrated.
One annotation in text, else fine in dustwrapper.
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London: The Hogarth Press. First English editions, 1960-1969.
Leonard Woolf's complete autobiography: 'Sowing', 'Growing', 'Starting Again', 'Downhill All the Way' and 'The Journey Not the Arrival Matters', includes his childhood, writing career, marriage to Virginia Woolf, beginnings of the Bloomsbury Group, life during the war years, and start of the Hogarth Press.
'I see myself as a panther, pacing up and down in a cage, gazing through the bars...'
Owners' signatures in 2 vols., discreet bookplate of the bibliographer of the Hogarth Press in all 5vols. All very good in dustwrappers with the no. of vols 2-5 written on the spine. The five volumes
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London: Simon and Schuster. First English edition, 2006.
A young administrator in colonial Ceylon, involvement in the early Labour Party, a maverick socialist whose passionately argued belief in collective security to prevent war, helped underpin the League of Nations – Leonard Woolf was always much more than the popular portrayal of him as either Virginia Woolf's carer and protector or as her oppressor.
This biography successfully keeps Virginia in second place, instead bringing out her husband's full stature.
His mantra 'Nothing matters, and everything matters' hints at the stability and wisdom he contributed to the Bloomsbury Group.
Extremities dusty, else fine in dustwrapper.
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