Victoria Glendinning Books

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, perhaps the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. Born in 1815, he initially made his living working for the Post Office, and introduced the pillar box into Britain. He was also an enthusiastic rider to hounds, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, a magazine editor, a traveller, the devoted friend of Thackeray and George Eliot and the author of over 60 books and a vast amount of journalism. This book explores Trollope's private life - his unhappy childhood, his relationships with his wife and a beautiful American, Kate Fielding - while creating a picture of the times in which he lived.

In Victorian England, electricity is the latest scientific marvel, a fireless light that announces a new era. For Charlotte Mortimer, electricity yields something even more powerful. When she weds an ardent young engineer who is commissioned to wire the estate of a country gentleman, Charlotte finds herself in a disorienting world of new ideas and sensations--and a passion that ultimately forces her to forge a life on her own terms.

The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate. This is her biography.

Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer and wit, Swift is best known as the author of "Gulliver's Travels". In this biography, Victoria Glendinning investigates the main events and relationships of Swift's life and provides a portrait set in a tapestry of controversy and paradox.

"I always wanted everything so frantically, and I'm just the person that can't have them.' Based on family papers and memories, this picture of middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century tells the poignant story of Winnie Seebohm, Victoria Glendinning's great-aunt, who in 1885 was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Though much loved by her family, Winnie was stifled in her desire for life and died at the age of twenty-two.

A biography of British poet and critic Edith Sitwel (1887-1964). Freed from her unhappy home life she set up home in a shabby London flat: she became - almost overnight - one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Her good looks attracted the photographer Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. She befriended Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The thirties she spent in penury, writing her novels, poems and biographies and it was only when Yeats hailed her as "a major poet" that her work reached a wider audience and she set off to conquer New York and Hollywood. Drawing on Edith's brilliantly funny and often outrageous letters, the author shows the spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman behind the public image

A portrait of a newly independent woman striving to break free from her overly concerned family's influence later in life.

In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living.

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory - an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing - without authority - on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore a settlement which has become a world city.After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests - botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1826, the year of his death.Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, but his fame immortal.

A monoplane falling out of the sky on a hot afternoon can shatter the leisurely peace of a croquet game below. And an injured aviator like Geoffrey Trafford can quite disrupt the calm of a girl like Marjorie Pope. All obstacles - her modern views, her socialism, her cool engagement to the worldly Mr Magnet - are swept away; and, as in every misguided fairy tale, 'the poor dears haven't the shadow of a doubt they will live happily ever after'. Written when Wells himself was caught in the entanglements of home and sex, this funny, utterly engrossing novel, shows him grappling with a perennial question; how can a marriage survive, when conventions stifle, when men and women want different things, when passions fade? Ironically, the answer he came to led to his meeting with an enraged young reviewer, Rebecca West - a collision as devastating as the plane crash in the rectory garden.

Dopo l'esperienza africana di Weekenders, ancora una volta il Daily Telegraph ha riunito lrvine Welsh, Monica Ali, Michel Atherton, Bella Bathurst, Jenny Colgan, Simon Garfield, W. F. Deedes, Tony Hawks, Victoria Glendinning, Sam Millet e Colm Toibin per catapultarli a Calcutta: dal confort e dalla modernità delle loro occidentalissime città, Londra e Edimburgo, a un luogo dove il passato parla ancora e il futuro chiama più forte che mai. Da quell'esperienza sono nati i racconti compresi in questa antologia che, mescolando la fiction al reportage di viaggio, riflettono modi diversi di vedere una metropoli che è nel mondo simbolo di povertà e miseria e che i suoi abitanti chiamano la Città della Gioia.

Das Leben der Vita Sackville-West liest sich wie ein Roman: Geboren wurde sie 1892 als einziges Kind von Lord Sackville und seiner halbspanischen Ehefrau Victoria auf Schloß Knole in Kent. Mit vierzehn Jahren schrieb sie ihren ersten Roman und bis zu ihrem Tod war sie nur dann mit sich zufrieden, 'wenn sie ein Buch in Arbeit hatte'. 1913 heiratete sie den Diplomaten Harold Nicolson, mit dem sie um Sissinghurst Castle einen der schönsten Gärten Englands gestaltete. Die Ehe, die wohl die ungewöhnlichste Verbindung dieses Jahrhunderts war, bestand über neunundvierzig Jahre. Beide Partner hatten im Laufe der Zeit viele Affären, die aber ihrer Verbundenheit nichts anhaben konnten. Fesselnd geschrieben, zeichnet Victoria Glendinning das auch kulturgeschichtlich aufschlußreiche Leben dieser unkonventionellen Frau auf: Vitas außerordentliche Entschiedenheit, mehr sein zu wollen als eine 'verheiratete Frau', ihre Liebesbeziehungen zu Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusius und anderen, ihre schriftstellerischen Leistungen und Erfolge, ihre gelassene Heiterkeit und ihre nie nachlassende Wärme in der Beziehung zu ihrem Mann und ihren Söhnen.

Britský deník Daily Telegraph pozval sedm rozdílných anglických autorů na jeden víkend do Súdánu, „aby se osobně angažovali ve válce, která byla do té doby mimo jejich dosah...“ Každý z autorů je mistrem svého žánru – a každý z nich musel vykročit ze svého odlišného, nicméně podobně výlučného světa. Irvine Welsh, znalec drogové subkultury Edinburghu; Alex Garland, nonkonformní autor dobrodružných románů; Victoria Glendinningová, autorka zachycující životy z jiných století; Andrew O’Hagan, pronikavý kronikář současných životů; Bill Deedes, který je již 70 let novinářem, psal poprvé v životě beletrii; a Tony Hawks se pokoušel složit se súdánskými domorodci píseň. Pouze Giles Foden se skupinou necestoval. Jeho příspěvek, o který jsme požádali až později, jelikož jeho zkušenosti z Afriky dodaly knize další rozměr, byl napsán před hrozivými událostmi 11. září.