George Orwell was a tireless & lively correspondent. He communicated with family members, friends & newspapers, figures such as Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender & Arthur Koestler, & strangers who wrote to him out of the blue. This carefully selected volume of his correspondence provides an eloquent narrative of Orwell ...

John Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, & personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume & vividly recreates the artist's life & work during the crucial decade of 1907-17
- a period during which Pablo Picasso & Georges Braque invented Cubism & to that extent engendered modernism. Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources & unpublished material. By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. & by bringing a fresh light to bear on the artist's often too sensationalised private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work. Never before has Picasso's prodigious technique, his incisive vision & not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity.
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'I have read all W. Scott's novels at least fifty times, ' wrote Byron. '-grand work. Scotch Fielding, as well as great English poet
- wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.' A. N. Wilson's subtle, entertaining & frequently provocative critical biography looks back through the indifference which has surrounded Walter Scott in recent times, & the distortions of his Victorian idolaters, to recapture the freshness of Scott as he appeared to his contemporaries. Despite his staggering output as a novelist, poet, biographer, historian & anthologist
- not to mention his copious letters, & the celebrated Journal
- Scott only embarked on his literary career in early middle age. In the face of constant ill-health, & financial & domestic troubles, he successfully combined the life of a bestselling, much-loved & enormously influential author with that of a lawyer, landowner, Border farmer, part-time soldier & paterfamilias. A. N. Wilson makes clear that Scott's genius, his humaneness, & his splendid qualities of stoicism & sympathy were as apparent in his life as in his work. Few writers can have been so likeable & so unpretentious, & it is hardly surprising that Scott has always been a popular subject with biographers. Yet most modern critics have tried to divorce the life from the work, or to minimise his reputation by suggesting that his talents were recognised in only a few of his works. By weaving together the life & the works, & discussing all Scott's best-known books as well as many which are less familiar, A. N. Wilson has produced a lively & contagiously enthusiastic reassessment of the writer who was, he believes, 'the greatest single imaginative genius of the nineteenth century'. Walter Scott's influence was felt not only in the field of literature, but also in the worlds of art, architecture, opera & domestic manners, & by figures as diverse as Byron & Queen Victoria, Dickens & Donizetti, Pugin & Victor Hugo.


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How often in life does convenience triumph over 'doing the right thing? & what is 'ethical living' anyway? When it comes down to it, most people fight shy of giving up their cars, or their toxic household products, their cheap washing machines, or dodgy, unethical bank accounts in order to make the world a better place. So Leo Hickman, resident consumer expert of the Guardian, decided to give it a try. Over the course of a year, he & his family set out to discover whether it was possible to live a 'normal life'
- job, mortgage, kids, holidays
- while at the same time making each daily choice or decision an 'ethical' one
- for the family, their neighbours & the environment. This the story of that year, is a record of an extraordinary transformation. Amid the pitfalls & confusion, Leo's account is funny, inspirational & a mine of information for the curious.


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