Victoria Glendinning Ordre des livres (chronologique)

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory - an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing - without authority - on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore a settlement which has become a world city.After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests - botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1826, the year of his death.Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, but his fame immortal.

Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt's house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations and freedoms of lost innocence, as well as the fears of the coming war.The Camomile Lawn moves from Cornwall to London and back again, over the years, telling the stories of the cousins, their family and their friends, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and the absurd conditions imposed by war as their paths cross and recross over the years. Mary Wesley presents an extraordinarily vivid and lively picture of wartime London: the rationing, imaginatively circumvented; the fallen houses; the parties, the new-found comforts of sex, the desperate humour of survival - all of it evoked with warmth, clarity and stunning wit. And through it all, the cousins and their friends try to hold on to the part of themselves that laughed and played dangerous games on that camomile lawn.

In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living.

Dopo l'esperienza africana di Weekenders, ancora una volta il Daily Telegraph ha riunito lrvine Welsh, Monica Ali, Michel Atherton, Bella Bathurst, Jenny Colgan, Simon Garfield, W. F. Deedes, Tony Hawks, Victoria Glendinning, Sam Millet e Colm Toibin per catapultarli a Calcutta: dal confort e dalla modernità delle loro occidentalissime città, Londra e Edimburgo, a un luogo dove il passato parla ancora e il futuro chiama più forte che mai. Da quell'esperienza sono nati i racconti compresi in questa antologia che, mescolando la fiction al reportage di viaggio, riflettono modi diversi di vedere una metropoli che è nel mondo simbolo di povertà e miseria e che i suoi abitanti chiamano la Città della Gioia.

Britský deník Daily Telegraph pozval sedm rozdílných anglických autorů na jeden víkend do Súdánu, „aby se osobně angažovali ve válce, která byla do té doby mimo jejich dosah...“ Každý z autorů je mistrem svého žánru – a každý z nich musel vykročit ze svého odlišného, nicméně podobně výlučného světa. Irvine Welsh, znalec drogové subkultury Edinburghu; Alex Garland, nonkonformní autor dobrodružných románů; Victoria Glendinningová, autorka zachycující životy z jiných století; Andrew O’Hagan, pronikavý kronikář současných životů; Bill Deedes, který je již 70 let novinářem, psal poprvé v životě beletrii; a Tony Hawks se pokoušel složit se súdánskými domorodci píseň. Pouze Giles Foden se skupinou necestoval. Jeho příspěvek, o který jsme požádali až později, jelikož jeho zkušenosti z Afriky dodaly knize další rozměr, byl napsán před hrozivými událostmi 11. září.

Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer and wit, Swift is best known as the author of "Gulliver's Travels". In this biography, Victoria Glendinning investigates the main events and relationships of Swift's life and provides a portrait set in a tapestry of controversy and paradox.

"I always wanted everything so frantically, and I'm just the person that can't have them.' Based on family papers and memories, this picture of middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century tells the poignant story of Winnie Seebohm, Victoria Glendinning's great-aunt, who in 1885 was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Though much loved by her family, Winnie was stifled in her desire for life and died at the age of twenty-two.

Londres années 1880. Charlotte n'a pas vingt ans quand ses parents, un couple étriqué de la petite bourgeoisie anglaise, accueillent un locataire du nom de Peter Fisher, jeune ingénieur, apôtre de la toute nouvelle science de l'électricité. Avec lui, Charlotte plonge d'un coup dans la modernité et, par son mariage, échappe à l'atmosphère étouffante de la maison familiale. Mais c'est auprès de lord Godwin, un aristocrate excentrique, qu'elle découvre les plaisirs et les tourments de la passion. Initiée, lors d'une soirée chez lui, au spiritisme, qui fait fureur à l'époque, elle exploitera son "don" à Londres, où, poussée par la nécessité, elle s'installera bientôt comme médium...

Anthony Trollope is, with Dickens, perhaps the most enduringly popular Victorian novelist. Born in 1815, he initially made his living working for the Post Office, and introduced the pillar box into Britain. He was also an enthusiastic rider to hounds, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, a magazine editor, a traveller, the devoted friend of Thackeray and George Eliot and the author of over 60 books and a vast amount of journalism. This book explores Trollope's private life - his unhappy childhood, his relationships with his wife and a beautiful American, Kate Fielding - while creating a picture of the times in which he lived.

A monoplane falling out of the sky on a hot afternoon can shatter the leisurely peace of a croquet game below. And an injured aviator like Geoffrey Trafford can quite disrupt the calm of a girl like Marjorie Pope. All obstacles - her modern views, her socialism, her cool engagement to the worldly Mr Magnet - are swept away; and, as in every misguided fairy tale, 'the poor dears haven't the shadow of a doubt they will live happily ever after'. Written when Wells himself was caught in the entanglements of home and sex, this funny, utterly engrossing novel, shows him grappling with a perennial question; how can a marriage survive, when conventions stifle, when men and women want different things, when passions fade? Ironically, the answer he came to led to his meeting with an enraged young reviewer, Rebecca West - a collision as devastating as the plane crash in the rectory garden.

The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate. This is her biography.

Lady Slane, veuve à 88 ans d'un aristocrate éminent, décide d'entamer une nouvelle vie. Elle déjoue obligations familiales et contingences matérielles, s'accordant in extremis une petite part de liberté et d'épanouissement personnel, en la personne de Fitzgeorge, très vieux collectionneur d'art célibataire, qu'elle a brièvement connu dans sa jeunesse et qui sera le complice de ses derniers jours, l'amant de coeur qu'elle a toujours rêvé d'avoir.

A biography of British poet and critic Edith Sitwel (1887-1964). Freed from her unhappy home life she set up home in a shabby London flat: she became - almost overnight - one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Her good looks attracted the photographer Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. She befriended Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The thirties she spent in penury, writing her novels, poems and biographies and it was only when Yeats hailed her as "a major poet" that her work reached a wider audience and she set off to conquer New York and Hollywood. Drawing on Edith's brilliantly funny and often outrageous letters, the author shows the spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman behind the public image