Books in the Vintage Lives series

This biography of Genet explores the perverse extremes of his life and writing, and separates the fact from the mythology which was fostered by Genet himself. Edmund White has interviewed lovers, friends, publishers and acquaintances, and has drawn from material, from letters (a number published here for the first time) and other original sources.

Flush was an English cocker spaniel who belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

'If men could see us as we really are, they would be amazed', wrote Charlotte Bronte, the outwardly conventional parson's daughter who had rarely met any men beyond those of the church or classroom by the time Jane Eyre was published in 1847.

Statesman, political thinker, orator and ardent campaigner, Edmund Burke was one of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century. His ideas and principles were expressed in the great debates over liberty, the rights of man and the American and French Revolutions, and are among the most important in modern history.

Virginia Woolf was a close friend of Roger Fry for many years - after his death she wrote this loving account of his passion for art, his own painting, and his challenging critical theories.

Auden's dedication as a writer was matched only by his commitment to challenging the received view of political and personal life.

Scott Fitzgerald follows the life of one of America's most enduring authors, from his early years in St Paul and at Princeton to New York in the twenties, the French Riviera, Baltimore, and finally Hollywood.