Containing excerpts from earlier tributes to Dahl's work and wit, this is an eclectic and funny collection of tidbits by and about the late author. It also features a missing chapter from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

"Will Self is one of Britain's best-known contemporary writers, a public intellectual whose novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into over twenty languages. In Will, his first ever memoir, he turns his attention fully to his own self, and in particular his addictions as a young man. An addiction memoir like no other, Will echoes the best of Self's psychedelic fiction, and is one of the most eloquent depictions of the allure...

A fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers. "Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself...

"The inimitable Deborah Levy, author of The Cost of Living, traces the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer"-- Provided by publisher.

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...

Whitbread Award winner Claire Tomalin's seminal biography of the enigmatic novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. Today Thomas Hardy is best known for creating the great Wessex landscape as the backdrop to his rural stories, starting with Far from the Madding Crowd, and making them classics. But his true legacy is that of a progressive thinker. When he published Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure late in his career, Hardy explored a very different...

"On the fiftieth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh's death, here is a completely fresh view of one of the most gifted--and fascinating--writers of our time Graham Greene hailed Evelyn Waugh as "the greatest novelist of my generation," and in recent years Waugh's reputation has only grown. Now, half a century after Waugh's death in 1966, Philip Eade has delivered a hugely entertaining biography that is both authoritative and full of new information, some...

Celebrated playwright Harold Pinter and critically acclaimed biographer Antonia Fraser lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty-three years later on Christmas Eve 2008. Must You Go? is an eccentric, hilarious and often moving testimony of their life together, based partly on Antonia Fraser's own diaries and also her own recollections of their fascinating life together. It is, above all, a compelling love story.

Presents a brief overview of the life and career of notable author J.K. Rowling. Designed for young readers, with photographs, a glossary of Harry Potter-related terms and another for text-related terms, print and digital resources, an activity, and critical thinking questions.

An obsessively readable memoir about the passions-and perils-of collecting, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Just My Type. From the Penny Red to the Blue Mauritius, generations of collectors have been drawn to the mystique of rare stamps. Once a widespread pastime of schoolboys, philately has increasingly become the province of older men obsessed with the shrewd investment, the once-in-a-lifetime find, the one elusive beauty that...