Bloomsbury Reader

"The man who asks a woman what she wants deserves all that's coming to him!" This was Melanie's viewpoint and she always knew exactly what she wanted. Julia was different. She worked in a dress shop...

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...

First published in 2000, this is a tale of Mrs. Feathers, who, taking a liking to her granddaughter, Patience, changes her will, leaving her fortune to the girl. Then Mrs. Feathers is found poisoned,...

What Columbus started in 1492 was finished in 1898, when the red and gold flag was lowered at Havana to mark the end of four centuries of Spanish dominance in the Caribbean. For two and a half...

Originally published in 1980, this is Dirk Bogarde's first novel. In the uneasy aftermath of WWII, a group of ordinary British soldiers and their families find themselves stationed as peacekeepers at...

First published in 1978, this is a London where the worst has happened. There have been riots, huge uncontrolled fires, outbreaks of savage looting, artillery battles, mass flights. The great city...

First published in 1948, this book may be described as Dame Edith Sitwell's personal notebook. It consists of essays on the subject of the general aspect of the plays-those great hymns to the...

'London guests staying hate it. Keeps them awake all night they complain. The bleating in the utter stillness. I heal with it, as you did.' This epistolary collection finds Bogarde at his most honest...

First published in 1994, this is Dirk Bogarde's fifth novel. Following on from his previous novel, Jericho, evoking the manifold themes and compelling rural French atmosphere of its predecessor, A...

First published in 1958, A Person From England tells of how the legendary cities of Turkestan - Merv, Khiva, Bokhara and Samarkand - have long exerted a romantic fascination upon Western travellers...

First published in 1953, A Place To Stand is set in Budapest in the spring of 1941, Hope - a spoilt but attractive society girl and daughter of a leading American business man - finds herself playing...

First published in 1943, this is a selection of writings from Dr. Sitwell's private notebooks. It includes essays on prosody, the role of the poet, the nature of poetry, and includes her full length...

First published in 1992, A Rather English Marriage tells of Roy Southgate and Reginald Conynghame-Jervi, who have nothing in common but their loneliness and their wartime memories. Roy, a retired...

First published in 1975, A Remarkable Case of Burglary tells of Val Leary, who is handsome, charming and broke. On the morning of April Fools' Day 1871, while walking through one of London's...

First published in 1967, this is a tale of Jordan Maddox who has so disciplined his own emotions that he has, in reality, little contact with life: indifferent, he no longer responds to the signs of...

Forced into returning to London because of his manager and partner's fast deteriorating health, Bogarde has to re-adapt to life in the West London neighbourhoods that groomed him as an aspiring young...

Alec Waugh describes his novel as an erotic comedy. It is the story of a respectable Treasury official, Victor Trail, and his wife Myra, whose marriage has lost its flavour, owing to Victor's...

London 1991. Journalist Kate Higgins is researching the life of Violet Levine, a woman who dragged herself up from shop girl to MP. Kate's own life becomes entangled with her subject, but as she...

One of the Bright Young Things in that brilliant and stimulating era between the wars, Alec Waugh remembers 1931 as being a year of firsts. It was the year he attended his first garden party, the...

First published in 1991, Absolute Hush is set during the Second World War when the human race stands at the crossroads: self-destruction or a glorious evolutionary step to higher consciousness. In...

First published in 1973, this is an account of those forbidden to carry parachutes; they lived in dread of being shot down in flames; their life expectancy was measured in days... But these were the...

In 1940, Sally Bowles, that spirited character from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, decides to leave her baby daughter with her parents in the country and return to London. There, despite...

The last of Alexandre Dumas's many mistresses, the American actress Adah Menken, called him "the king of romance." She was not thinking only of his immensely popular novels The Three Musketeers and...

Walter Fast was born in Vienna not long after the First World War and as a child he lived through the political turmoil of Central Europe, which culminated with Hitler's annexation of Austria. As was...

First published in 1984, this is the tale of a child of the slums, a murderer's widow, and a convicted prostitute. The tale of Mary Waterhouse who rises from her sordid beginnings in London's...

First published in 1983, An Orderly Man is volume three of Dirk Bogarde's best-selling memoirs After completing work on Visconti's Death in Venice, the celebrated actor seeks a refuge from 20 years...

First published in 1994, this is an incisive analysis of a woman caught up in evil, a viscerally realistic novel about a Nazi test pilot loosely based on the life of Third Reich heroine Hanna Reitsch...

First published in 1996, this collection of stories tells of the ghost of a doomed romance haunting an Oxford undergraduate's idyllic summer affair; a tragedy of hopeless love and murderous...

In the Year AD 80 the Colosseum opened with quite the longest and most nauseating organized mass orgy in history. It was a mammoth celebration on the grandest scale, a fitting inauguration for an...