Thomas Hardy was shy to a fault. He surrounded his house, Max Gate, with a dense curtain of trees, shunned publicity and investigative reporters, and when visitors arrived unexpectedly he slipped quietly out of the back door in order to avoid them. Furthermore, following the death of his first wife Emma, he burnt, page by page, a book-length manuscript of hers entitled "What I think of my husband", together with letters, notebooks, and diaries - both his and hers. This behaviour of Hardy's therefore begs the question: did he have something to hide, and if so, did this 'something' relate to his relationship with Emma? "Thomas Hardy: Behind the Mask" pierces the veil of secrecy which Hardy deliberately drew over his life, to find out why his life was so filled with anguish, and to discover how this led to the creation of some of the finest novels and poems in the English language.

In the 1930s, writers associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain set out to transform English culture. Creating a substantial body of Marxist literary criticism, and drawing on ideas from their own cultural traditions and from the Soviet Union, critics such as Christopher Caudwell, Alick West and Ralph Fox showed how Marxism could play a major role in analysing literature and its place in society. This book is the first full-length study of the British communist critics of the Thirties. Seeking to relate Marxist literary criticism to the broader history of the communist movement, it shows how the work of the leading critics both reflected and subverted the left-wing orthodoxies of the day.

The Victorian era produced many famous writers and poets, including Dickens, Thackeray, H.G. Wells and Tennyson. Magazines like The Strand launched famous creations such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whose cliff-hanger stories were told in part-works to add to the excitement.The poetry was epic, Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and The Lady of Shalott tapped into the Pre-Raphaelite style so popular in the art of the day. Russell James has explored the role of the Victorian writer and their genres, from Dickens’ desire to correct social wrongs and expose poverty to H.G. Wells’ desire to escape the modern world. The responsibility of the Victorian poet is also revealed from romantic declaration and escapism to heroism and historical commemorations – would modern generations know about the Charge of the Light Brigade if Tennyson hadn’t immortalised it? Together with A-Zs of writers and poets, this is a must-read book for everyone who loves good writing and wants to discover more.

Between about 1880 and the end of the First World War there was a widespread and multi-faceted revival in traditional handcrafts in the Lake District. Inspired initially by the teachings of John Ruskin, pioneers such as Albert Fleming, Marian Twelves, and Hardwicke and Edith Rawnsley established workshops in Keswick, Kendal and elsewhere to produce textiles (especially linen and lace), woodwork and metalwork made by hand by local craftsmen and women. Their output found a ready market both locally and nationally and formed the basis of a series of highly successful art exhibitions, notably those at Kendal in 1891 and 1899. The Lakeland arts revival has hitherto been neglected by writers more concerned with national developments in this period, or else wrongly regarded as part of the Arts and Crafts Movement, whereas it developed earlier and independently, springing from essentially local roots. This new study, based on the author's Manchester University Ph.D. thesis, for the first time gives proper weight to the Lakeland revival and rescues a number of important figures from undeserved obscurity.

An entirely new kind of biography, Oscar’s Books explores the personality of Oscar Wilde through his reading. For Wilde, as for many people, reading could be as powerful and transformative an experience as falling in love. He referred to the volumes that radically altered his vision of the world as his ‘golden books’; he gave books as gifts – often as part of his seduction campaigns of young men; and sometimes he literally ate books, tearing off corners of paper and chewing them as he read. Wilde’s beloved book collection was sold at the time of his trials to pay creditors and legal costs. Thomas Wright, in the course of his intensive researches, has hunted down many of the missing volumes which contain revealing markings and personal annotations, never previously examined.

In this unique book, Keith Armstrong assesses the life and work of Newcastle born writer Jack Common, in the light of the massive social, economic and cultural changes which have affected the North East of England and wider society, through the period of Common's life and afterwards. He seeks to point out the relevance of Common to the present day in terms of his ideas about class, community and the individual and in the light of Common's sense of rebelliousness influenced by a process of grass roots education and self improvement.

They're called the classics for good reason. Whether they're a work of wacky imagination, a piercing insight into social and cultural traditions at the time of writing, or simply a fantastically absorbing story, all the books featured in "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" have come about out of people's desires to communicate a story, a message or a lesson. From much loved tales to off-beat cult fiction and the timeless classics of the nineteenth century, discover the influences on the authors, plots and characters of the books that really should make up part, if not all, of your library.Battle orks with Frodo and Aragorn in "Middle Earth", go on the road with Kerouac in search of freedom, get involved with questions of gender and androgyny with Orlando, immerse yourself into the full and expansive portrait of India created by Seth in "A Suitable Boy" and enter the world of Christoper Boone in his touching and amusing quest to find the killer of his neighbour's pet dog. All of these books, and many more are reviewed with fresh perspectives in terms of plot, the ideas that they bring out and why they deserve, above others, to be recommended and read.

When Agatha Christie, the so-called 'Queen of Crime', disappeared from her home in Sunningdale in Berkshire for eleven days on 3 December 1927, the whole nation held its breath. The following day, when her car was found abandoned fourteen miles away, a nationwide search was instigated. From a painstaking reconstruction of Agatha's movements and behaviour during those eleven days, Dr Andrew Norman is able to shed new light on what, in many ways, has remained a baffling mystery. Only now, fifty years after Agatha's death, is it possible to explain fully, in the light of scientific knowledge, her behaviour during that troubled time. By deciphering clues from her celebrated works, "Agatha Christie: The Finished Portrait" sheds light on what is perhaps the greatest mystery of all to be associated with Britain's best-loved crime writer, namely that of the person herself.

The life of Edmund Gosse was one of continuous contradiction. As he recalled in "Father and Son", he was a precocious only child brought up by his extraordinary father, whose thinking and conduct were dominated equally by the Bible and the "Actinologica Britannica", a study of marine life. Later, with inexplicable poise, he was simultaneously the intimate of Swinbourne and a sunday school superintendant, and public opinion divided in calling him the most discerning critic in England and a 'literary charlatan' with a 'genius for inaccuracy'. Gosse's rise to pre-eminence was rapid, and at his death he was acknowledged as the friend of Tennyson and Hans Christian Anderson, the confidant of Browning, R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, and the champion of Ibsen, Gide and Yeats. In her biography, Ann Thwaite has painstakingly separated the facts from prejudice and rumour to reveal a picture of Edmund Gosse which can at last be called true to life. She refuses to ignore his many contradictions, but shows how they reflect the complexity of his singular genius.

Using a combination of newspaper cuttings and articles, Public Records information and other documents, this book gives a detailed account of the events leading to the arrest, trial and conviction of George Edalji - a South Staffordshire solicitor sentenced to 7 years penal servitude for maiming a horse in 1903. The author describes in great detail the background to what became one of the great miscarriages of justice of the 20th century.

This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from a desire for a new beauty of life; beauty that also, for many, required them rejecting the sexual conventions of the Victorian era. From the early 1880s and well into the twentieth century, the efforts of these writers and activists existed in critical tension with other contemporary developments in literary culture. Livesey maps the ongoing dialogue between socialist writers like William Morris, decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and defining figures of early modernism including Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry. She concludes that socialist writers developed a distinct political aesthetic in which the love of beauty was to act as a force for revolutionary change. The book draws on archival research and extensive study of socialist periodicals, together with readings of works by writers including Morris, Wilde, Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, Isabella Ford, Carpenter, Alfred Orage, Woolf and Fry. Livesey uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism and by tracing the lives of neglected writers and activists such as Clementina Black and Dollie Radford, she provides a vivid evocation of an era in which revolution seemed imminent and the arts a vital route to that future.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): short storywriter, author and poet, but also imperialist, racist, misogynist, and sexually confused? Kipling's life and experiences spanned exhilaration (growing up in India during the Raj) and cataclysm (losing his only son in World War I). He has been vilified as an imperialist and racist; his work considered 'politically incorrect'. Yet, he is one of the few, if not only, writers of the time to describe his world in exacting, caring detail - to tell us of 'the little man', whether private soldier, sailor or a poor native boy. Having lived a charmed early childhood in India and experienced a rather more horrid existence in foster homes and boarding schools as a boy, Kipling's early years equipped him with an imagination that allowed him to create such ever popular children's classics as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories for Children. Perhaps because his poetry was more straightforward and easily understood in a single reading, critics have not bothered to analyse it for hidden meaning and warning, looking for the irony behind the simple language he used. If he was truly a champion of British Imperialism, why would he turn down a knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, yet accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907? Is Kipling the Man as simple to understand as his work or is there complexity hiding under the veneer? Would a committed patriot and imperialist pen lines such as 'If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.' ('Common Form', 1919). This new biography sheds light on the man and places him in context as a sensitive artist of his time.

Kate Grenville's "The Secret River" was one of the most loved novels of 2006. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the story of William Thornhill and his journey from London to the other side of the world has moved and exhilarated hundreds of thousands of readers. "Searching for the Secret River" tells the story of how Grenville came to write this wonderful book. It is in itself an amazing story, beginning with Grenville's great-great-great grandfather. Grenville starts to investigate her ancestor, hoping to understand his life. She pursues him from Sydney to London and back, and slowly she begins to realise she must write about him. "Searching for the Secret River" maps this creative journey into fiction, and illuminates the importance of family in all our lives.