Diana Souhami

Natalie and Romaine met in London during World War I and their partnership lasted until Natalie died 52 years later. They were both American expatriates; unconventional, energetic, flamboyant and rich. Natalie was known as ‘the wild girl of Cincinnatti’. She had numerous affairs with other women: Renée Vivien who nailed shut the windows of her apartment, wrote about the loveliness of death, drank eau de cologne and died of anorexia aged 30; and Dolly Wilde niece of Oscar, who ran up terrible phone bills and died of a drugs overdose. She wrote books of aphorism, memoirs and poems and her Friday afternoon salons in the cobbled garden of her Parisian house were for ‘introductions and culture’. They were frequented by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Radclyffe Hall and Edith Sitwell. Romaine achieved fame in her own lifetime and after as an artist. She painted her lovers including Gabriele d’Annunzio with whom she had a terrible and tortured relationship, and the ballerina Ida Rubinstein. However her relationship with Natalie was constant and in their eventful years together they threw up a liberating spirit of culture, style and candour. Diana Souhami has written a fascinating portrait of these two enigmatic figures, as well as a moving portrait of a forgotten time.

Natalie and Romaine met in London during World War I and their partnership lasted until Natalie died 52 years later. They were both American expatriates; unconventional, energetic, flamboyant and rich. Natalie was known as ‘the wild girl of Cincinnatti’. She had numerous affairs with other women: Renée Vivien who nailed shut the windows of her apartment, wrote about the loveliness of death, drank eau de cologne and died of anorexia aged 30; and Dolly Wilde niece of Oscar, who ran up terrible phone bills and died of a drugs overdose. She wrote books of aphorism, memoirs and poems and her Friday afternoon salons in the cobbled garden of her Parisian house were for ‘introductions and culture’. They were frequented by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Radclyffe Hall and Edith Sitwell. Romaine achieved fame in her own lifetime and after as an artist. She painted her lovers including Gabriele d’Annunzio with whom she had a terrible and tortured relationship, and the ballerina Ida Rubinstein. However her relationship with Natalie was constant and in their eventful years together they threw up a liberating spirit of culture, style and candour. Diana Souhami has written a fascinating portrait of these two enigmatic figures, as well as a moving portrait of a forgotten time.

Offers an account of the life and experiences of Alexander Selkirk, whose adventures and solitary struggle for survival after being marooned on a desert island inspired Daniel Defoe's classic novel "Robinson Crusoe."

Offers an account of the life and experiences of Alexander Selkirk, whose adventures and solitary struggle for survival after being marooned on a desert island inspired Daniel Defoe's classic novel "Robinson Crusoe."

This is a biography of Radclyffe Hall, one of England nost eccentric contemporaywomen. She is also the quintissential gay and lesbian icon. The book spans her whole life from her unhappy childhood to the contravercy of her most famous book" Well of Loneliness". Brilliantly written, witty and satirical, this major new biography brings a fresh and irreverent eye to the life of this fascinating eccentric.

The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place - Paris, Between the Wars - fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own - forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves their stories into those of the four central women to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-War Paris.

Murder at Wrotham Hill takes the killing in October 1946 of Dagmar Petrzywalski as the catalyst for a compelling and unique meditation on murder and fate. Dagmar, a gentle, eccentric spinster, was the embodiment of Austerity Britain's prudence and thrift. Her murderer Harold Hagger's litany of petty crimes, abandoned wives, sloughed-off identities and desertion was its opposite. The texture of their lives and the impression their experiences made on their characters fated their meeting on that bleak autumn morning - and determined the manner in which both would meet their death.

Edith Cavell, even if not on a scale with Joan of Arc or Florence Nightingale, has been one of the quieter immortals of history. There has been little written about her in years save at that younger level and surely the 1918 film has long since been forgotten. Ryder's careful--in the best sense--just and surely readable biography of the girl whose name, ironically, means ""happy in war"" begins with her unexceptional childhood in a vicarage, her small jobs later as governess, including one in Belgium, and goes on to her training as a nurse, when she was past 30, at the London Hospital, followed by work in a Poor Law Institution. Indeed costermongers and miners found this level, grey-eyed woman far more approachable than some of her colleagues. Later she would return to Belgium to nurse at the Clinique when World War I broke out and the Clinique became an underground waystop for resistance escapers, including General Giraud. Her own implication and the later political repercussions around this case are not pursued too closely though surely she was active: there was one incautious letter home and in others one can spot the interlinear messages. She was shot at dawn in 1915 and few have forgotten her last words: ""This I would say, standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone."" They speak for her, timelessly.