Penguin Classics: Biography & Memoir

This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost. In 1975, Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months, he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was, in the author's words, 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his...

Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it, Strachey exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale. In his essays on Dr...

Although 'continually and bitterly ashamed' that the Arabs had risen in revolt against the Turks as a result of fraudulent British promises of self-rule, Lawrence led them in a triumphant campaign which revolutionised the art of war. Seven Pillars of Wisdom recreates epic events with extraordinary vividness. In the words of E. M. Forster, 'Round this tent-pole of a military...