Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron. Soon he was trying out his ‘prose-tales’ – often horror melodramas such as ‘The Fall...

Effie Gray, a Scottish beauty, was the heroine of a great Victorian love story. Married at nineteen to John Ruskin, she found herself trapped in a loveless and unconsummated union. When her...

This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at every aspect of Lennon’s much-chronicled life, including the songs that turned him, posthumously, into almost a secular saint. In...

‘We Churchills die at forty,’ said Winston in 1908, ‘and I want to put something more on the slate before then.’ By the time he died in 1965, the slate was full.From his earliest days...

The Queen’s story is our history: she was not born to be Queen but, a media star since the age of three, she has been the most famous woman in the world for all of our lives.In this definitive...

Minnie Sidgwick was just twelve years old when her cousin, twenty-three-year-old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853.Edward went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie – as...

Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she ‘the people’s princess’, who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative,...

Readings of selected correspondence between the poet Philip Larkin (played by Alan Bennett) and the writer Kingsley Amis (played by Robert Hardy). A meeting at Oxford University during World War...

For more than a quarter of a century, Philip Norman’s internationally bestselling 'Shout!' has been unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his...

In September 1939, housewife and mother Nella Last began a regular diary that lasted for thirty years. The account that she left of life during the Second World War is moving, fascinating and...

In this timely, touching book, bestselling author Alan Titchmarsh offers an evocative portrait of the royal family, while also exploring their adapting roles against a backdrop of social change....

Born in 1910, Rose Plummer grew up in an East End slum, where you fought an unending battle with hunger and bed bugs.

At the age of fifteen, Rose started work as a live-in maid at a...

Tracing his ancestry through six generations – slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, he discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was...

This is the first biography of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh - both royal, both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, but, in temperament and upbringing, two very different people.