Novelistic Biographies

Aged just 23, and already set on a life of adventure, Roger Taylor signed up as an able seaman on the square-rigger Endeavour II, bound from Australia to New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. It was t …

Just a few weeks after the foundation of the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971, Dr Sultan al-Qasimi was selected as the new ruler of Sharjah. With the addition of a further and final emirate in …

The deliciously funny confessions of a debutante which became an international bestseller Fresh from convent school, Charlotte Bingham finds herself propelled from the private tortures of dancing cla …

Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the ”Congress System” became the primary instrument of diplomacy in Europe. So central was the Austrian Chancellor Metternich to the political-legal Congre …

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it”s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. Returning to his home in Japan after his father-in-law”s sudde …

Sabiha Sertel was born into revolution in 1895, as an independent Turkey rose out of the dying Ottoman Empire. The nation”s first professional female journalist, her unrelenting push for democracy a …

Governor General’s Award Finalist: A “wry, moving” memoir of a woman retracing her grandfather’s escape from Amsterdam during the Holocaust (Alison Pick, Booker-nominated author of Between Gods). Why …

”A nuanced and witty meditation on confronting the challenges life throws at us all” Oliver Burkeman Jonathan Rowson”s competitive success as a chess Grandmaster and work as an applied philosopher …

Carefully piecing together the personal letters of Alice ”Liesel” Schwab, Escaping Nazi Germany tells the important story of one woman”s emigration from Heilbronn to England. From the decision to …