Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

A hitherto unknown pornographic manuscript of Robert Burns is found in the effects of a dead schoolmaster of impeccable reputation. Max Arbuthnot, an Edinburgh lawyer and a rich man, who at the age of sixty has a rampant appetite for the pleasures of the flesh, takes charge of it. As the manuscript...

A narrative of his time in Denmark, this work is largely concerned with the topography of the country, telling the intending visitor about all those features of the country's buildings, landscape and people which are most characteristic and best worth seeing. First published in 1956, this is...

V.S. Pritchett's Englishness – the dependable Englishness of shabby, bumptious businessmen, shy wives, puritanical suburbanites and vinegar-tongued grandmothers – often came out in surprising ways. Though comfortably set in the dirty brick factories south of the river or the dreary commuter villages...

First published in 2004, this novel tells the story of Robert Jarvis who dies from a heart attack, leaving his wife Margaret a widow at forty-two. Family and friends rally round, but their attentions only serve to stifle her, and with increasing suspicions that her marriage had not been as perfect...

'I didn't realise that for want of one person the world could be meaningless.' Blissfully in love for the first time, seventeen-year-old Polly thus confides to her grandmother, Muff. And these words could equally well have been spoken by Muff, or Polly's mother, Tessie. Muff can never forget her beloved...

To the family in the house crouched between the hills, Aunt Zita's annual visits, like the north wind that accompanies her, bring chaos, terror and enchantment. Yet to the young narrator, Aunt Zita's visits herald every wild night of the imagination: here fabulous feasts precede fantastic flights...

The extraordinary decade of the 1960's was always slightly out of sync. It began late - with a remarkable flourish in 1963 with The Beatles, That Was the Week That Was, the Profumo affair and the Great Train Robbery all competing in an atmosphere of giggling frivolity for newspaper headlines - and...

A novel in which a young woman marries an old man and falls in love with her stepson, an excellent example of early twentieth-century psychological realism.

Professor Charles Lexington led a placid and uneventful life until he made the mistake of discovering a way by which lead could be turned into gold. A Mr. Bowry volunteered to help the Professor capitalize the discovery, and from then on things began to happen. Before Professor Lexington got back...

Set against World War II, this is a tragi-comic tale of an Englishman who tries to start a potato farm in rural Ireland, and is mistaken for a hero by the locals - with bizarre consequences, escalating to accidental death, suicide, and murder. "McGinley's story is by turns funny and ferocious....

In this rich and engrossing biography of Thomas Lipton, Alec Waugh has recreated the fascinating and complex figure of a man who became a legend in his own lifetime, a millionaire before he was forty, an unofficial ambassador at large, and an unforgettable sportsman to millions of people. The son...

A biography of one of the London theatre's most important wits and playwrights. Donaldson discusses the life and work of the man who wrote over twenty plays and musicals that were produced in London in the first half of the 20th century.

Purple The Code used by the Japanese prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbour . . . Did the Americans have advance information of the devastation to come? Had they cracked Purple . . ? Colonel William Friedman was 'the man who broke purple': this fascinating new biography of the world's...

The four Robinson children, 12 year old Rex, 10 and a half year old twins Guy and Elizabeth, and Martin, who is 7, are about to go on an astonishing adventure. Their sleepy life in a quiet London suburb will be exchanged in an instant for a dangerous sea-voyage, a battle with pirates, an encounter with cannibals, and a very serious mission to find an iced cake on a desert island.