Most Popular Books by Hilary Spurling

Absorbing and provocative, a biography of George Orwell''s controversial second wife from the Whitbread Prize-winning author of Matisse the Master and Anthony Powell Just three months before his death, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four took a new wife. Sonia Brownell was model for Julia in Orwell''s most famous novel, she was fifteen years younger than her husband, and after his death she was hounded and pilloried as a manipulative gold-digger who would stop at nothing to keep control of the literary legacy. But the truth about Sonia was altogether different. Beautiful, intelligent and fiercely idealistic, she lived at the heart of London''s literary and artistic scene before her marriage to Orwell changed her life for ever. Those who knew her - Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus - witnessed her great personal generosity. And yet, burdened with the almost impossible task of protecting Orwell''s intellectual estate, Sonia''s loyalty to her late husband brought her nothing but poverty and despair.

Henri Matisse was one of the most important and beloved artists of the twentieth century, rivalled only by his friend - and competitor - Pablo Picasso. Hilary Spurling''s The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master were together heralded as the definitive biography of the artist, and Matisse the Master went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2005. In this abridged, one-volume edition, Hilary Spurling reveals the origins of Matisse''s astonishing talent, provides a unique insight into his life and work, and, by documenting the difficult path he took alone, clearly places him at the front rank of those who made art modern.

With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse''s attempts to counteract the violence of the 20th century in paintings.

Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck''s father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family''s budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah''s Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.

Shortly before his death in 1978, Paul Scott won the Booker Prize for Fiction. In this biography, the author explores Scott''s family background in North London, his war years in India and the Far East, the development of his fiction and the characters on whom his most famous creations were based.

In the tradition of The Professor and the Madman, this fascinating account describes the astounding life of Therese Humbert, a 19th-century con-artist eccentric who lifted herself out of poverty by posing as an aristocrat. Illustrations.

A unique reference book for all fans of Anthony Powell''s 12-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, which has become a literary landmark of twentieth-century writing. More than a simple glossary, Invitation to the Dance contains extensive Character, Book, Painting and Place indices, creating a magnificent database of Powell''s imagination and England''s cultural landscape. This is a masterpiece of ''extreme ingenuity'' detailing over four hundred characters and one million words of Powell''s lively fifty-year dance of fiction and fact. ''Hilary Spurling''s exhaustive analysis of the novel''s characters supplies a master-key for the reader of Anthony Powell.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition by the same name to be held at Musaee Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambraesis, Oct. 23, 2004-January 25 2005, Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 5-May 30 2005, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 23-September 25, 2005.

In this fully illustrated biography, Hilary Spurling sheds an entirely new light on the humiliations and failures that Henri Matisse had to overcome in order to develop into the greatest French painter of the 21st century. She skillfully evokes the French art scene of those changing years and conveys what Matisse was looking at, what he experimented with, endured and suffered. Because his family maintained strict control of both personal archives and posthumous privacy, no full biography of Matisse has ever been written until now. This superlative book -- the first of two volumes -- successful marries scholarship of a very high order with a vivid, energetically-paced text. 3A splendid work.2 3This book is marvelous to read.2

The much honored biographer unearths the life and work of Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels captured ordinary life in China.

Thérèse Humbert was the "assumed illegitimate daughter of an American billioniare," but when her hoax was revealed, she spent five years at hard labor. "When she was released from prison, she vanished, and the fantastic story of her life was mostly hushed up, because it had disgraced so many wealthy and important people."--Jacket.