Bloomsbury

This, unlike most of Margaret Irwin's books, is not an historical novel. It is a peep-show at recent times, so fantastically gay that this, our London, appears as the iridescent scene of a pantomime or holiday charade. What happened behind the door at which one had to knock four times? Many wildly incongruous happenings, but chiefly an attack on...

The amazing tale of the scandal that surrounded one of turn-of-the-century England's most beautiful women - and how it nearly unseated the British government during the First World War. When the noble-born Mary Cornwallis West, known as Patsy, started a secret affair with a wounded soldier billeted at her family's estate, neither of them dreamed...

In this passionate, playful, and indispensable guide, oyster aficionado Rowan Jacobsen takes readers on a delectable tour of the oysters of North America. Region by region, he describes each oysters appearance, flavor, origin, and availability, as well as explaining how oysters grow, how to shuck them without losing a finger, how to pair them with...

The letters in this volume were written by Rose Macaulay to her younger sister, Jean, between 1926 and her death in 1958. These were the years when she was at the height of her powers and when her reputation was spreading beyond the more limited circles which had appreciated her earlier novels. She had found in broadcasting a new medium of...

Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this...

In 1939, at the age of nineteen, Jim Bailey was conscripted into the RAF to train as a fighter pilot. What happened over the next five years to Jim and the men he met, the men who fought, died and survived, is related with candour and quiet modesty in this book. It describes the youthful heroism of his companions, and he captures the atmosphere of...