Irreverently funny and surprisingly moving, All Passion Spent is the story of a woman who discovers who she is just before it is too late. After the death of elder statesman Lord Slane—a former prime minister of Great Britain and viceroy of India—everyone assumes that his eighty-eight-year-old widow will slowly fade away in her grief, remaining as proper, decorative, and dutiful as she has been her entire married life. But the deceptively gentle Lady Slane has other ideas. First she defies the patronizing meddling of her children and escapes to a rented house in Hampstead. There, to her offspring’s utter amazement, she revels in her new freedom, recalls her youthful ambitions, and gathers some very unsuitable companions—who reveal to her just how much she had sacrificed under the pressure of others’ expectations.

In the mid-nineties Birjees Dawar Ali returns to Pakistan to seek out a history left unfinished long ago, a history from which, nursing heartbreak and betrayal, she had once earlier fled, back to her home in partitioned India. Will she find the family that so generously gave her succour, the home that became her own, the people who gave her unquestioning love? Or will all these certainties have fled with the march of history? A deeply moving narrative of love and loss, All Passion Spent focuses on the unresolved question of the 1947 Partition of India and the emergence of India and Pakistan as two separate countries. Zaheda Hina’s richly layered narrative, brought alive in this lyrical and poetic translation by Neelam Husain, touches on the many unanswered questions that surround this painful history—the profound sense of grief and displacement, the lives sundered midstream, the lost friendships and the quest for new roots and lands under different skies.

From 1946 to 1957, Vita Sackville-West, the poet, bestselling author of All Passion Spent and maker of Sissinghurst, wrote a weekly column in the Observer describing her life at Sissinghurst, showing her to be one of the most visionary horticulturalists of the twentieth-century. With wonderful additions by Sarah Raven, Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst draws on this extraordinary archive, revealing Vita's most loved flowers, as well as offering practical advice for gardeners. Often funny and completely accessibly written with colour and originality, it also describes details of the trials and tribulations of crafting a place of beauty and elegance. Sissinghurst has gone on to become one of the most visited and inspirational gardens in the world and this marvellous book, illustrated with drawings and original photographs throughout, shows us how it was created and how gardeners everywhere can use some of the ideas from both Sarah Raven and Vita Sackville-West.

This is an extraordinary collection of essays by one of this country's most exciting and dramatic thinkers.The essays span a considerable time. But they turn on a central, compelling theme. What is meant by reading a serious text at a time when theories of language and literature question the very possibility of any agreed meaning, and at a time when new technologies seem likely to replace books as we have known them since Gutenberg. This question is brought to bear deliberately on the touchstone examples: the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare. Also on Kierkegaard and Kafka. The closely-meshed collection ends with a series of essays on the philosophic-theological underwriting of communication, with particular reference to what language tells us of Socrates and of Jesus. These essays by George Steiner, distinguished critic and Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, seek to conjoin the themes argued in such books as The Death of Tragedy, Language and Silence, After Babel and Real Presences. They speak of a profound, if sometimes troubled, joy.

An adaptation of Dymphna Cusak's acclaimed first novel published in 1935 & set in Australia's Bloomsbury set of free thinking liberals: poetic portrayal of three women.

Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of her love affair with Violet Keppel Trefusis in 1920 is one of intrigue and bewilderment. In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson combines his mother's vivid memoir of escapade with what he learned from copious family letters and explains the context of this romantic crisis. He also describes how Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson went on to live the rest of their lives in harmonious marriage.

After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf's death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons.