Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence

If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

Seeing self-possession as the key to an existence lived 'in accordance with nature', the Stoic philosophy called for the restraint of animal instincts and the importance of upright ethical ideals and virtuous living....

When Helene Hanff makes an innocent inquiry about the possibility of purchasing hard-to-find books through Marks and Co., Booksellers, she begins a 20-year love affair with Frank Doel....

At long last, millions of Dune fans can now hear the unpublished chapters and scenes from Dune and Dune Messiah....

Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks....

The definitive anthology of Jim Morrison's writings with rare photographs and numerous handwritten excerpts of unpublished and published poetry and lyrics from his 28 privately held notebooks....

Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958....

As Assistant Private Secretary to four monarchs, 'Tommy' Lascelles had a ringside seat from which to observe the workings of the royal household and Downing Street during the first half of the 20th century.... 

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s....

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom....

A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de Camondo....

Victory and defeat, love and loss are the prevalent realities of Letters from the Greatest Generation, a remarkable and frank collection of World War II letters penned by Americans....

A literary treasure of over 100 unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends....

A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States....

The Reagan Diaries provides a striking insight into one of this nation's most important presidencies and sheds new light on the character of a true American leader....

This second volume of the best-selling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the prime minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement....

The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same....

The Flame is the final collection of the seminal musician and poet, which he was determined to complete before his death....

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the closing years of the 10th century....

Dear Papa is an intimate and illuminating glimpse at Ernest Hemingway as a father, revealed through a selection of letters he and his son Patrick exchanged over the span of 20 years....

A meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature....

A never-before-heard collection of deeply personal love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his first wife, Jane, compiled and edited by their daughter....

New York Times best-selling author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses presents a revelatory glimpse into the mind and soul of our 16th president through his private notes to himself, explored together here for the first time....

In this book I have attempted to solve each and every one of life's problems. And I have succeeded....

It took me trying to save you to realize you weren't the person I thought you were. If you only knew how much I loved you, you would've understood why I wanted and needed to save you. This is for you, whoever you really are. And you just might be me.

Michael Palin's diaries begin when he was newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy. But Monty Python was just around the corner...Enjoying an unlikely cult status early on, the Pythons then proceeded to tour the USA and Canada. As their popularity grew, so Palin relates how the group went their separate ways, later to re-form for stage shows and the celebrated films The Holy Grail and Life of Brian.

The Second World War had been under way for a year when Marie and John Williamson welcomed two English brothers to join them and their two children in their small house in north Toronto for the duration of the conflict. Marie wrote over 150 letters to the boys’ mother, Margaret Sharp, imagining that she could make Margaret feel she was still with her children. She shepherded the boys through education decisions and illnesses, eased them into a strange new life, and rejoiced when they embraced unfamiliar winter sports.

Seven-year-old Frankie awakens the morning after her mother’s surgery to learn a horrible truth from her father: “Mommy didn’t make it.” Frankie’s life turns upside down as the house fills with visitors, a funeral is held, and Mommy lies in a satin coffin wearing a dress she’d never be caught—well, dead, wearing. It's powder blue! All wrong, wrong, wrong! Sadness envelops Frankie. She listens to children playing in the neighborhood, instead of joining them. She stays in her room, coloring, or reading, or otherwise drowning herself in grief. 

These letters, in the form of a frank and amusing diary, were written by a private in Wellington's army who fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Private Wheeler's record covers the Peninsular Campaign, keeping order during the coronation of Louis XVIII (whom he called 'an old bloated poltroon') and his later posting to Corfu.

From the critically acclaimed Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, comes a paean to the power of language, and a direct address to the artistic, professional and philosophical concerns that challenge and sometimes torment an author. Comprising fifty-two short prose pieces, Letters to a Young Writer ranges from practical matters of authorship, such as finding an agent, the pros and cons of creative writing degrees and handling bad reviews

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered. 

Former stuntwoman Victoria Bolt shares how she escaped a volatile and violent home life to make movies with her childhood crush, Burt Reynolds, in 1980s and ’90s Hollywood. There are long-haul truckers, narrowly missed punches, family dysfunction and unconditional love, and appearances by BR himself. This is a Middle American fairy tale set to John Cougar Mellencamp in a smoke-filled bar. This is a shoutout to listeners who grew up on the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the '80s. This is an action-adventure love story, filled with laughter and heartache.

Ella Ward comes from a long line of irrepressibly charming raconteurs, letter-writers, storytellers and people who 'quite like giving toasts at parties'. And so, a few years ago, when Ella was 36 years old, with a husband and a young daughter, and was told that she had a rare cancer and might die, she decided that death wasn't going to stand in the way of her mothering her child. As Ella's treatment for her cancer began, she started drafting letters to her daughter. 

Before Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Doonesbury, there was Art Buchwald. For more than fifty years, from 1949 to 2006, Art Buchwald’s Pulitzer Prize-winning column of political satire and biting wit made him one of the most widely read American humorists and a popular player in the Washington world of Ethel and Ted Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham. Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State, called Buchwald the “greatest satirist in the English language since Pope and Swift.”

Born at Steventon in 1775, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children. She lived a quiet life, moving to Bath, Southampton, Chawton and eventually to Winchester where she died unmarried in 1817 at the age of 42. It is to her elder sister Cassandra that most of her surviving letters are written, and through them, we discover the intimate world of the English gentry.

In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott went back to the huge frozen wasteland of the Antarctic with the intention of reaching the South Pole, by a long and terribly arduous trek across the ice. On finally reaching the pole, Scott and his comrades were devastated to find that they had been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. With temperatures of minus 30, they began their slow journey back to their base.

Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in 1771, being one year younger than her brother William. After their mother died in 1778, they were separated and did not return to the Lake District until 1794, when they spent two happy months walking around the hills near Keswick, eventually settling down at Grasmere in 1799. The journals that Dorothy kept are remarkable for the detailed observations she makes of the surrounding countryside and people, often providing glimpses of poverty and suffering, as well as displaying her complete love affair with nature. 

George Gordon Byron was born in 1788, the son of the profligate 'Mad Jack' Byron, and succeeded to the title in 1798 moving to the family seat of Newstead Abbey. He attended Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he proved to be a poor scholar, preferring boxing, the low life and poetry, publishing his first volume of poems in 1806. In 1809, at 21, he embarked on a grand tour of Europe and on his return to England he married the humourless Annabella Milbanke, who gave birth to his daughter Augusta in 1815. 

Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), known as ‘The Hero’ during his own lifetime was both an inspiring commander and an innovative tactician, becoming a rear admiral after defeating the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. He was also responsible for the great victories of the Nile (1798) and Copenhagen (1801). Revered by his officers and men, he was renowned for both his arrogance and his scandalous love affair with the beautiful Emma Hamilton.