Showing results by author "Richard Bradford" in All Categories

The Durrells are probably the most celebrated literary family of the 20th century. Gerald turned them into celebrities with his tripartite memoir, beginning with My Family and Other Animals (1956) which told of his experiences with his widowed mother Louisa and three siblings during their time in 1930s Corfu. We know of the Durrells from their own writings and from the image of them created by TV, film and biographical accounts of specific figures. What we do not know is the truth.

Novelists, poets and playwrights live double lives, sharing the real world with everyone else while spending a good deal of time in a universe of their own making. When they fall out with each other, they are able to kindle feuds and antagonisms as passionate and public as workers in any trade. Richard Bradford’s highly entertaining audiobook looks at some of the closest and most complex relationships in literary history, examining their dramatic effects on literature itself.

It is hard to overstate the role that John Milton played in the historical, political, and literary controversies of 17th-century England; his writings and very life challenged the status quo. This fascinating new biography is divided into two parts. The first separates the man from the myth, and elucidates the complicated details of Milton's life from his early years as a literary artist uncertain of his destiny, through his work as a propagandist for the Cromwellian republic, to his rewriting of the Old Testament story of the Fall.

Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction has been largely avoided by biographers. She was openly homosexual and wrote the seminal lesbian love story, Carol. However, her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers.

The first biography to examine Mailer's life as a twisted lens, offering a unique insight into the history of America from the end of World War II to the election of Barack Obama. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer’s life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.