Biography

Naguib Mahfouz

Egypt's Nobel Laureate
by Rasheed El-Enany

The Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was the father of the Arabic novel. Born in the old quarter of Jamaliyya in Cairo, the traditional neighbourhood played an important role in his earlier realistic novels such as Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy, and as a metaphor for Egyptian society in later works such as Children of the Alley and The Harafish. He established an international reputation and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, but accusations of a blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in Children of the Alley led to a fatwa against him by Islamic extremists, and he was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 1994.

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Price: £7.99

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.

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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.

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Price: £16.00

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.

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Gandhi

The Man, his People and the Empire
by Rajmohan Gandhi

This monumental biography of one of the most intriguing figures of the 20th century, written by his grandson, is the first to give a complete and balanced account of Gandhi’s remarkable life, the development of his beliefs and his political campaigns, and his complex relations with his family.

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Price: £20.00