Juliet Gardiner Book order

The story both of the real world of the Brontës at Haworth Parsonage, their home on the edge of the lonely Yorkshire moors, and of the imaginary worlds they spun for themselves in their novels and poetry. Wherever possible, their story is told using their own words – the letters they wrote to each other, Emily and Anne's secret diaries, and Charlotte's exchanges with luminaries of literary England – or those closest to them, such as their brother Branwell, their father Patrick Brontë, and their novelist friend Mrs Gaskell. The Brontës sketched and painted their worlds too, in delicate ink washes and watercolours of family and friends, animals and the English moors. These pictures illuminate the text as do the tiny drawings the Brontë children made to illustrate their imaginary worlds. In addition, there are facsimiles of their letters and diaries, paintings by artists of the day, and pictures of household life. This beautifully illustrated book offers a unique and privileged view of the real lives of three women, writers and sisters.

"I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do anything one does. I lived on honeycomb." Oscar WildeAlthough it is over 120 years since his infamous trial for indecency, Oscar Wilde has never held greater fascination for us. This packed illustrated biography tells the life of Oscar Wilde through his own words – private letters, poems, plays, stories and legendary witticisms. It includes his relationships with key artists and writers of the time, including John Ruskin, Charles Ricketts, and Lillie Langtry.It is illustrated throughout with paintings, engravings, contemporary photographs, cartoons and caricatures of Wilde and his social circle. With illustrations and paintings by Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Whistler and Max Beerbohm, it is a beautiful evocation of the glittering fin de siecle word by its most fascinating wordsmith and aesthete.The book details Wilde's ruin after the trial and its outcome. The profundity of his writing from prison and exile form an epitaph, not only to his own life, but also for the era that carelessly delighted in it.

From Britain's leading social historian, a lyrical look at the changes to women's lives since 1940, told with examples from her own life. The book provides an intimate, brilliant account of feminism over the last 6 decades.

As `Wartime' did for the 1940s, this book will grasp the broad spectrum of events in the 1930s in the words of contemporary witnesses drawn from metropolitan and provincial letters and diaries, newspapers, periodicals, books and the range of rich material available in the British Library.

From the author of `Wartime' comes an outstanding history of the most sustained onslaught ever endured by Britain's civilian population - the Blitz.

A short, hard-hitting 1946 novel, originally published under the pseudonym 'Sarah Russell', about sex in wartime London.

The definitive account of life on the Home Front during the Second World War, which was published in 2004 to universal critical acclaim.

Hilary Wainwright, poet and intellectual, returns after the war to a blasted and impoverished France in order to trace a child lost five years before. The novel asks: is the child really his? And does he want him? These are questions you can take to be as metaphorical as you wish: the novel works perfectly well as straight narrative. It's extraordinarily gripping: it has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller while at the same time being written with perfect clarity and precision.

A Yorkshire family experience the Second World War, by living in a semi-detatched house in Kent and having a comittee of historical experts, a nutritionist and vetrans of the Home Front, controlling how they live. They can withdraw foods, requisition their car, and even limit how much bath water they use.