Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He's the most famous man their Missouri town has ever produced: a naval officer and an astronomer - a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe.

There are so many kinds of awful men - One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead.

Includes such poems as Lady Lazarus , Daddy and Fever 103 degrees .

A work that gives us one of the liveliest poetic voices.

Documents one of the great untold stories of British music over the past century. This title surveys the visionary, topographic and esoteric impulses that have driven the margins of British visionary folk music from Vaughan Williams and Holst to The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, John Martyn and Aphex Twin.

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.

In 1935, Lawrence Durrell, a young Englishman living on Corfu, wrote enthusiastically to a middle-aged Brooklynite - Henry Miller - of his just published novel Tropic of Cancer . Miller felt that he had found his ideal reader and responded, thus beginning a correspondence that lasted 45 years.

A resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century.

Featuring a collection of comic, grotesque, other-worldly stories, the author recalls work from writers as diverse as JG Ballard, David Foster Wallace and Toby Litt.

As he grew up, the author witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids. This work features a collection of essays that tell the story of that period in our cultural and political life.

Explains how the premiere of Beethoven's staggering last symphony was emblematic of its time - a work of art unlike any other - and a magisterial, humanistic statement that remains a challenge down to our own day and for future generations.

A memoir of Geoffrey Wythenshaw that examines with heart and humour what it means to grow old.

Offers a collection of essays which argues that art is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature.

This collection includes Dear's earlier plays as well as his masterly adaptation for television of Henry James' chilling The Turn of the Screw , which will be screened on ITV in Spring 2000.

It's Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles.