Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

Legal systems like to think of themselves as impartial and fair, dispensing the objective morality of Justice. But, from time to time, a court of law can be as political, prejudiced, and biased as any other arm of the State. The classic instance is the story of the trials of Alfred Dreyfus. In...

In 1837, at the age of twenty-three, Angela Burdett-Coutts inherited a vast fortune from her banker grandfather, making her one of the richest and thus potentially powerful women in Victorian England. She moved in the highest social circles: entertaining the rising stars of the political scene, Disraeli...

First published in 1989, this is an account of the oldest of traditions. It was called the London Season, and for three centuries it had been a time of fashionable suppers and brilliant balls that introduced England's most aristocratic and eligible girls to society. Though by 1939 the stately gavottes...

Storm Jameson writes of Stendhal "as one speaks in suitable company of a friend". She knew him very well. Over the years she read everything available by him and she immersed herself in his life and his writings - and the two cannot be separated. As a biographical subject, Stendhal is vastly...

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden is home of two of the most famous opera and ballet companies in the world. In this official history, Frances Donaldson discusses Covent Garden's many legendary achievements - Der Rosenkavalier with Lotte Lehmann, the unparalleled partnership of Fonteyn and Nureyev,...

Love, hope, heaven... We will meet again Some lessons we learn at school; some we learn from experience. But there are some life lessons that only others can teach us. Two women meet every Friday morning at eleven o'clock at a cemetery. One is grieving over the tragic and early death...

If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the sixties defined the second half, acting as the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are indelibly stamped with the impact of this tumultuous...

First published in 1977, A Postillion Struck by Lightning is volume one of Dirk Bogarde's best-selling memoirs Following Bogarde from childhood through adolescence, to the beginnings of his budding career, A Postillion Struck by Lightning is a heartfelt memoir, offering insight into what created...

Eric Linklater was one of the most respected and prolific Scottish writers of this century, yet more than twenty-five years have passed since his last collection of short stories was published. This selection covers Linklater's entire writing life. The settings are as various as the places...

First published in 1972, Ronald W. Clark's definitive biography of Einstein, the Promethean figure of our age, goes behind the phenomenal intellect to reveal the human side of the legendary absent-minded professor. Here is the classic portrait of the scientist and the man: the boy growing up in the...

It was the last refuge of the desperate Jews-the warren of sewers underneath their city. Above, the Nazis implemented the destruction of their friends and relatives in a final Aktion against the ghetto in the Polish city of Lvov. A small band of Jews, however, escaped into the grim network of tunnels,...

V.S. Pritchett explores the connections between Chekhov's life and art, showing how Chekhov often based his fiction on experiences of his difficult early years where he was responsible for his impoverished family, and as a young doctor, reported on the conditions of the Russian penal colony at Sakhalin....

Henrietta was no one's enemy. She came to London from Boston in search of her father-- a father thought lost to her until she discovered her aunt's treachery. Now armed with her mother's marriage papers, she set sail for England to prove her identity and, unknowingly, to gain a fortune--and...

This enthralling study which examines the impact of the Spaniards upon the Aztec and Inca worlds is dominated by the personalities involved, in particular Cortes and Montezuma. Their confrontation in the Aztec lake-city of Tenochtitlan is a moving drama of human conflict revealing the dilemma and...