As editor of Grove Press in the 1960s, Richard Seaver successfully challenged America's censorship laws over the publication of D.H. Lawrence's sexually explicit and long outlawed novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover. He also shepherded Henry Miller...

E.M. Forster received a third life in the 1980s when his novels Howards End and A Passage to India became art-house film hits; his second life had already begun in the ’70s with the posthumous publication of his explicitly gay novel Maurice. In her sympathetic and lucid biography, Wendy Moffat examines the...

A.N. Wilson has always been a hard one to pin down politically, at least if the pins and boards come off the shelf at the Wal-Mart of ready-made ideas. In recent years the award-winning British biographer has turned his attention to interpreting the history of his island kingdom from the post-Napoleonic through the post-modern...

In 1988, no one expected the East Bloc to disintegrate within a year. In Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov’s cheeky, sharply worded account of the last days of the Evil Empire, none of the key players—not Reagan, Bush or John Paul II—had any idea where events would lead. Pleshakov’s...

E.M. Forster was one of Britain’s best-selling literary authors a century ago, and is known nowadays to art house lovers from film adaptations of Howards End, A Passage to India and Maurice. In his perceptive and critical analysis, Frank Kermode writes that Forster “wanted to write books that would please creative...