Balzac
by Stefan Zweig | 
Victor Hugo
by Graham Robb | 
Samuel Beckett
by Anthony Cronin | 
Tony Hancock
by John Fisher | 
The Knox Brothers
by Penelope Fitzgerald | 
Dorothy Day
by William Miller |
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
by Selina Hastings |
Tom
by Lyle Leverich |
The Lonely Hunter
by Virginia Spencer Carr |
Gore Vidal
by Fred Kaplan |
The Kindness of Strangers
by Donald Spoto |
Anthony Trollope
by Victoria Glendinning |
Eudora Welty
by Suzanne Marrs |
A Pilgrim in the Ruins
by Jay Tolson |
The Skeptic
by Terry Teachout |
The Sisters
by Mary S. Lovell | 
The Churchills
by Mary S. Lovell |
A Scandalous Life
by Mary S. Lovell | 
Straight on Till Morning
by Mary S. Lovell | 
Gellhorn
by Caroline Moorehead |
Their marriage was both improbable and inevitable. Isabel Arundell was a schoolgirl, the scion of England's most distinguished Catholic family. When she first saw him while walking at a seaside resort, Richard Burton had already made his mark as a linguist (he was fluent in twenty-nine languages), scholar, soldier, and explorer--at once a symbol of Victorian England's vision of empire and an avowed rebel against its mores. When she turned and saw him staring after her, she decided that she would marry him. By their next meeting, Burton had become the first infidel to infiltrate Mecca as one of the faithful, and, in an expedition to discover the source of the Nile, would soon be the first white man to see Lake Tanganyika. After being married, the Burtons traveled and experienced the world, from diplomatic postings in Brazil and Africa to hair-raising adventures in the Syrian desert. In later life Richard courted further controversy as a self-proclaimed erotologist and the translator of The Kama Sutra. Based on previously unavailable archives, Mary Lovell has written a compelling joint biography that sets Isabel in her proper place as Burton's equal in daring and endurance, a fascinating figure in her own right.