A Personal Record is an autobiographical work (or "fragment of biography") by Joseph Conrad, published in 1912. It has also been published under the titles A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences and Some Reminiscences. Notoriously unreliable and digressive in structure, it is nonetheless the principal contemporary source for information about the author's life. It tells about his schooling in Russian Poland, his sailing in Marseille, the influence...

When Agatha Christie, the so-called 'Queen of Crime', disappeared from her home in Sunningdale in Berkshire for eleven days on 3 December 1927, the whole nation held its breath. This work explains, in the light of scientific knowledge, her behaviour during that troubled time.

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay" and convinced she will become a boy at age 4. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where a father and stepfather come and go at strange, overlapping intervals, the keeping of secrets becomes a way of life. Her late teens bring her to law school in London and then to Sheffield...

"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why--despite all the evidence to the...

A biography of Greene's life, describing his childhood, his psychiatric treatment at 16, life at Oxford, and his career as a novelist.

"A monumental, definitive new biography - the most important since Quentin Bell's acclaimed work of twenty-five years ago - of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most fascinating writers. Hermione Lee has created a miraculously evocative portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. With novelistic precision,...