Books by Paul Bailey

In his first collection of poetry after a career as a novelist spanning five decades, Paul Bailey offers in Inheritance an intimate reckoning. The poems mine memories of childhood, illness and lost loves with unflinching honesty, a generous humour born of self-knowledge, and great depth of feeling.

In May 1927, nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu, a skinny boy with literary ambitions, is newly arrived in Paris. He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life. An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohème by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d'Alsace, a notorious establishment rumoured to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement - a prince's boy - whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man's teacher in the ways of the world. At a distance of forty years, and written in London, his refuge from the horrors of Europe's early twentieth-century history, Dinu's memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust, separation, despair and even death to endure a lifetime. This is a work of extraordinary sensual delicacy, an exquisite novel from one of our most celebrated writers.

Ma Jianzhong, advisor to a main Qing government official, was the first Chinese to advocate the creation of a specialized and professional diplomatic corps. This translation of his essays aims to contribute to a wider understanding of the origins and circulation of reform ideas in the late Qing.

Examines the various kinds of censorship which have oppressed homosexual men and women. Discussing artists as diverse as Marcel Proust, Benjamin Britten, WH Auden and Terence Rattigan, Saki and Ronald Firbank, this book explores the true nature of "camp" and the rich tradition of subversive and comic art created by the censoring of the sexual.