Biography

Catherine the Great

Life&Times
by Michael Streeter

Catherine the Great (1729–96), born Sophia Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst, daughter of a minor German princely family, rose to become the greatest ruler of the vast Russian empire in the 18th century. Married to the erratic Emperor Peter III, she seized power for herself, and her husband was murdered shortly afterwards. This ‘foreign’ princess then ruled her growing domain with a vigour and devotion that was the equal of that of any Russian.

read more »

Price: £7.99

Judy Garland


by Paul Donnelley

Judy Garland was one of the greatest performers of the 20th century, whose fame and popularity have long outlasted her early death in 1969 at the age of only 47. Forever associated with the role of Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz and the song she sang in it, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’, the demands first of her ambitious mother and then the studio bosses effectively robbed her of a normal childhood whilst at the same time forcing her to maintain her ‘girl next door’ image and a punishing work schedule with near-starvation diets and amphetamines, resulting in a dependence on drugs and alcohol which finally ended her career and her life, when she died of a drug overdose in a flat in Chelsea.

read more »

Price: £18.00

Shakespeare

Life&Times
by Jeremy Lemmon

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born a tradesman’s son in Stratford-upon-Avon and died one of the town’s wealthiest and most respected citizens. His would have seemed no more than a modestly and prosaically successful career, were it not for the fact that he was also a writer of genius.

read more »

Price: £7.99

Farewell to Salonica

City at the Crossroads
by Leon Sciaky

In this warm and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the First World War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city’s diverse communities – Jews, Muslim Turks, Orthodox Greeks and Bulgarians – met, traded and lived alongside each other in a day-to-day atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance. Salonica was also a point of contact between East and West, and Sciaky describes the impact of Western ‘machine civilisation’ on the older, more human ways of the Orient.

read more »

Price: £14.40

Keynes

Life&Times
by Robert Cord

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles. A part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, and close friends with Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he combined his revolutionary economic work with sponsorship of the arts, being a founder and first chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and a very successful career as a stock-market speculator. By the time of his death at the age of 63 in 1946, he was the most influential economist in the world.

read more »

Price: £7.99