Juliet Gardiner

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 Wilde Although 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.

'An accomplished and intensely evocative memoir ... A journey of courage and determination ... Joining the Dots... will become in time an integral part of our understanding of postwar Britain' Daniel Kynaston, Books of the Year, Observer

From the author of â?? Wartimeâ?? comes an outstanding history of the most sustained onslaught ever endured by Britain's civilian population â?? the Blitz.

As â?? Wartimeâ?? 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.

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

Juliet Gardiner's critically acclaimed book - the first in a generation to tell the people's story of the Second World War - offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the pervasiveness of war on the Home Front. The book has been commended for its inclusion of many under-described aspects of the Home Front, and alongside familiar stories of food shortages, evacuation and the arrival of the GIs, are stories of Conscientious Objectors, persecuted Italians living in Britain and Lumber Jills working in the New Forest. Drawing on a multitude of sources, many previously unpublished, she tells the story of those six gruelling years in voices from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall, from the Houses of Parliament to the Nottinghamshire mines.