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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorShakespeare: The World as Stage
Bill Bryson · 208 pages
William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected a
Maggie Smith
Michael Coveney · 353 pages
"No one does glamour, severity, girlish charm or tight-lipped witticism better than Dame Maggie Smith. Michael Coveney's biography shines a light on the life and career of a truly remarkable performer, one whose stage and screen career spans six decades. From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie's path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights and directors
Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson
Paula Byrne · 470 pages
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam: An Illustrated Memoir
Ann Marie Fleming · 173 pages
The Invisible Woman
Claire Tomalin · 352 pages
A portrait of nineteenth-century actress Ellen Ternan, the woman who was the mistress of Charles Dickens, describing her secret relationship with the author.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt · 430 pages
"How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare? Stephen Greenblatt enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life - full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger - could have become the world's greatest playwright. Greenblatt makes inspired connections between an entertainment presented to Queen Elizabeth on a vi
The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw
Sheila Hancock · 320 pages
Sheila Hancock's moving and compelling memoir of her marriage to John Thaw When John Thaw, star of The Sweeney and Inspector Morse, died from cancer in 2002, a nation lost one of its finest actors and Sheila Hancock lost a beloved husband. In this unique double biography she chronicles their lives – personal and professional, together and apart. John Thaw was born in Manchester, the son of a lorry
Shakespeare: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd · 572 pages
Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape--the industry, the animals, even the flow
Hamilton: The Revolution
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarter · 287 pages
Offers a behind-the-scenes view of Hamilton the musical, detailing the many dramatic episodes in Alexander Hamilton's life.
Shakespeare by Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare
Mark Anderson · 640 pages
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
James Knowlson · 872 pages
Damned to Fame follows the reclusive literary giant's life from his birth in Foxrock, a rural suburb of Dublin, in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989. Knowlson brilliantly re-creates Beckett's early years as a struggling author in Paris, his travels through Germany in 1936-37 as the Nazis were consolidating their power, his service in the French Resistance during World War II, and the years of li
Fosse
Sam Wasson · 736 pages
"We see Bob Fosse's legacy everywhere--from Broadway to "Billy Jean" to Beyonce's moves in the "Single Ladies" video. Yet in spite of Fosse's deep cultural significance, no biography has ever brought him fully to life, unveiling the man behind the bowler hat and the swaggering sex appeal. Now, acclaimed cultural historian Sam Wasson traces Fosse's numberless reinventions of himself over a career t
Oscar Wilde
Richard Ellmann · 680 pages
In this long-awaited biography, Wilde the legendary Victorian--brilliant writer and conversationalist, reckless flouter of social and sexual conventions--is brought to life. More astute and forbearing, yet more fallible than legend has allowed, Wilde is given here the dimensions of a modern hero. The author depicts Wilde's comet-like ascent on the Victorian scene and his equally dramatic sudden ec
Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep
Michael Schulman · 336 pages
The first thoroughly researched biography of Meryl Streep -- the "Iron Lady" of acting, nominated for nineteen Oscars and winner of three -- that explores her beginnings as a young woman of the 1970s grappling with love, feminism, and her astonishing talent.
Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard
Laura Bates · 306 pages
Drama: An Actor's Education
John Lithgow · 320 pages
Sharing a backstage history of his early life and career--and paying tribute to his father, Arthur Lithgow--the author reveals why actors are driven to perform, and why people are driven to watch them do it.
Underfoot in Show Business
Helene Hanff · 177 pages
Helene Hanff's witty memoir of her adventures and misadventures as an aspiring playwright in New York City, 1940s-1960s.
The Orton Diaries
Joe Orton · 304 pages
Fron December 1966 to his murder in August 1967, Joe Orton kept a series of diaries that prove to be one of the most candid and unfettered accounts of that remarkable era. They chronicle his life from his literary success to his sexual escapades.
And Furthermore
Judi Dench · 294 pages
From the moment Judi Dench appeared as a teenager in the York Mystery Plays it was clear that acting would be her career. Trained at London's Central School of Speech and Drama it was her performance in her twenties as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's memorable Old Vic production that turned her into a star. But it is her role as 'M' in six James Bond films beginning with GOLDENEYE in 1995 that has g
Sex with Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love
Jillian Keenan · 343 pages
"When it came to understanding love, a teenage Jillian Keenan had nothing to guide her--until a production of The Tempest sent Shakespeare's language flowing through her blood for the first time. In Sex with Shakespeare, she tells the story of how the Bard's plays helped her embrace her unusual sexual identity and find a love story of her own."--
Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper
Gypsy Rose Lee · 350 pages
The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters we