Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

Sefton and his sister Clemence are dispatched to separate boarding schools. Their father's second marriage, their mother's economies, provide perfect opportunities for mockery, and home becomes a source of shame. More wretched is their mother's insistence that they excel. Their desperate means to...

The Last and the First wasIvy Compton-Burnett's final novel. In it she deals with her familiar themes - tyranny, power and corruption. Although the novel was unfinished at the time of her death in 1969, it combines the brilliant wit and incisive insight into human relationships which make her one of the most original novelists in English literature.

At the centre of this novel stands Harriet Haslam, the epitome of the maternal power figure,whose genuine but overpowering love dominates the novel and whose self-knowledge drives her into insanity. Even after her death Harriet continues to dominate. Surrounding this central figure are a host...

Storm Jameson's fine novel tells the story of two men, their beginnings, ambitions, wives, failures, successes. Gregory Mott is seen at first solely through the eyes of other people: the old man who taught him when he was a child; his aristocratic wife; his oldest friend, Lambert Corry; and...

In this work, first published in 1953, C. Day Lewis, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, chooses a form that enables his various gifts to be displayed to advantage and to sustain rapt interest in a poem longer than convention now favours. It is a poem in seven parts: 'Dialogue at the Airport';...

Here, Belloc writes of a trip through Sweden and Denmark in 1938, a nostalgic trip taken forty-three years after his first Scandanvian trip in 1895.This volume includes Belloc's history and topography of the area.

Part of Croft-Cooke's series of autobiographical works, *The Sensual World.*The Author says, 'I have given this book its title because the words seem to fit each of the two journeys it records, journeys which, in the cant phrase of the courtroom, ran concurrently.The first was through the Mediterranean...

The storm rages. They huddle closer round the flames as the wind howls in the night. Another ghost story begins. But is the old house really deserted, or is something screaming in the darkness? Do you dare to find out?

Every night Gary wakes sweating with fear. Every night the dreams come. Gary does not know what the dreams mean. Who is the stranger who hammers at the door? Who is the baby whose cries can be heard? He and his family are newcomers to the Isle of Wight, but Gary is soon to find his life inextricably...

The bright summer sun faded into the shimmering Mediterranean as the young American painter began what was to be the five most perfect hours of his lifetime. It would be more than just an affair, a passionate encounter, and yet it would come to nothing. It would be a period of total enchantment that...

Ivor Porter first came to Romania in 1939 as a teacher of English - to the exotic, semi-oriental Bucharest described by Olivia Manning. After the war had broken out, and Romania had been absorbed into the Axis sphere of influence, he - together with his fellow-expatriates - was forced to leave a colourful,...

In March 1912 the Postmaster-General accepted the Marconi Company's tender to build the first six stations of a wireless chain to link up the British Empire. The negotiations had been conducted for the Marconi Company by the Managing Director, Godfrey Isaacs, brother of Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General....

First published in 1965 and based on the author's own experience as an officer in the British Intelligence and packed with the most closely observed detail of the people, places and costumes of the Levant, The Mule on the Minaret is a long, colourful, fascinating story of wartime intelligence centred...

First published in 1961, this collection of Thirteen stories has been compiled as Alec Waugh looked back over his career as an author, and takes from his writing those which he feels are amongst his most personal creations, bringing them together into a panorama. Told in the first person, My...