Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

VS. Pritchett, master of the short story, is also the most evocative of travel writers. First published in 1967, his portrait of Dublin - its past, politics and people, its grand mansions and curious corners - is as beguiling and eloquent as the city itself, as he writes of the Dublin he knew in the...

First published in 1989, in Bel Mooney's Somerset she sets the tone of this delightfully personal account of her 'adopted county'. Brought up in Liverpool, she writes of Somerset with the rapture of the late convert, travelling through its towns and villages in all seasons, observing sights as various...

First published in 1951, this is part sentimental journey revisiting old well-loved scenes of former travels, and part search for new, out-of-the-way lands, Alec Waugh's travel book tells of a journey half-way round the world. But in new or old places, the author's sense of romance and adventure,...

Tuesday 8th May 1945, Victory in Europe Day: Germany surrenders unconditionally to Russia and the West, marking the end of Hitler's war. With this surrender comes the end of six years of suffering and austerity across the world – it is the dawn of a new era. The war-weary British people celebrate...

It wouldn't be for years after that fateful day when Alexander Fleming sneezed on a petri dish and stumbled upon Penicillin, that the almost miraculous power of this mould would transform the lives of every person on the planet. In Florey, The Man Who Made Penicillin we follow the life of Howard Walter...

No hive can tolerate two Queens. In the fatal clash between the Protestant Queen of England and the Catholic Queen of Scots, many were determined that 'The death of Mary is the life of Elizabeth'. In this moving chronicle a modern poet magnificently recaptures the splendid colour and sordid...

Sitwell's Fanfare for Elizabeth is a striking account of love, betrayal, and religion as it unfolds in the court of King Henry VIII. Sitwell navigates elegantly through the capricious nature both of Henry's court, and his love life. The youthful hardships of little Elizabeth are played out against...

1816 was the fateful year when the Romantic poet Shelley and his lover Mary shared a hectic creative and sexual menage in Switzerland with Lord Byron. This intense period drew from the men some of the greatest poetry of the age; from Mary, it elicited the seminal figures of Frankenstein and his Creature....

In this autobiography, Denis Healey reveals the breadth of his interests and his knowledge of the arts. In this book, he takes time to look at the literary influences that have shaped his life - his comments are interlaced with quotations from poetry, fiction, philosophy and history, providing a guide to help readers rediscover books he or she may once have read, following onto new authors.

In his lifetime, Evelyn Waugh's personality and his attitude to the post-war world aroused almost as much controversy as his works did admiration. It is with Evelyn Waugh the man as she knew him that Frances Donaldson is principally concerned. His own autobiography covered the first 25 years...

An unhappy wife is found dead in her bed, in circumstances that point to murder. Her husband, Roderick Strood, is arrested and put on trial. But before this happens we have become intimately acquainted not only with the Stroods and their problems, but with the individual members of the jury on whose...

No names are dropped for the sake of it. No mad and witty intimacies with the great are vaunted. Few wild parties are attended, despite the eccentric pressures of Frances Donaldson's father, the playwright Frederick Lonsdale, whose personality is one of the book's delights. First published...

Spring 1914. At a masked ball, the Duke de Richleau has an intriguing meeting with a beautiful woman - an incident that was to lead to a series of desperate adventures with a Serbian; a secret; a terrorist society; then as a British secret agent at the Austrian Supreme Headquarters. The capers culminate...

Two years after Emma Woodhouse married Mr Knightley and they have settled into loving, if not quite passionate, matrimony; Emma is bored. To amuse herself, Emma decides to take up matchmaking again, whether her husband will have it or not. But this time Emma is playing for dangerously high...