Books published by Vintage Publishing

Michael Longley has been called 'one of the finest lyric poets of our time'. Longley's poetry combines intense concentration with remarkable variety. Longley's genres span love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, poems that reflect on art and the art of poetry.

In this remarkable book Jonathan Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience.

Medea has been abandoned by her husband. His new bride is the daughter of the most powerful man in Corinth and Medea and the boys are to be forced to leave the state and become refugees. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively.

Set in the fictional Free Republic of Aburiria, Wizard of the Crow dramatises with searing humour and piercing observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Ngugi wa Thiog'o reveals humanity in all its surprising intricacy.

Early in 1974, Bernard Donoughue, a young academic at the London School of Economics, was invited by Harold Wilson first to help fight the General Election and then to found and run the Policy Unit at Number Ten Downing Street, a body independent of the Civil Service machine working solely for the Prime Minister.

Tells the story of Pawel, a young businessman, in debt to loan sharks, seeking help from former friends; and of Warsaw, a hostile landscape of apartment blocks, factories, and suburban wastelands, 'a city that at nine-thirty goes to ground, coming to a halt, and giving time to those who have nothing to do'.

Bullfighting - the ultimate spectator sport. Acclaimed novelist A. Beyond the theatre, the costume and the well-worn plot she focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on. The result is a startling confrontation with her own, and mankind's, mortality.

A few weeks after Eva has been sent to a rehabilitation centre in the Massif de la Chartreuse, Therese gets a job faraway and asks Vollard to visit her daughter on her behalf. However, nothing seems to help "La Petite Chartreuse" - Vollard calls Eva that way in reference to the monastic order of the Chartreux - to enjoy life again.

Only two of them have a realistic chance of being offered the job, and when Del Rieco, the 'games master', informs them that the nature of the contest is simulated economic warfare and that competitors must be eliminated, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary recruitment drive.

Lee Annis has finally found some success as part of a band she fronts with Billy but all is set to change as Billy pulls the plug on the band. Seeking relief Lee resorts to sex and drugs but finds herself abandoned by those whom she previously thought cared about her.

Satirizing the tedium of upper-middle-class life in post-war London, this novel depicts a world in which substance is far less important to anyone than appearance. The question asked throughout the text concerns the differences between doting and loving.

A newcomer has arrived in a small Welsh seaside town, a one armed Liverpudlian. Seeking to rebuild his life, he is attempting to lead a life here unlike any life he's lived before: a normal one. However, two men are leaving Liverpool, sent by their gang boss to wreak revenge on a one armed man, maybe living somewhere in west Wales.

'I was exhausted at the end, & yet I am sure that if ever I saw & heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.'So wrote Isaiah Berlin's secretary Lelia Brodersen to a friend in 1952, after hearing one of Berlin's Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.

This text contains accounts of the author's conversion to hindu, his pacifism during World War II, his time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and his friendships with the likes of Garbo, Chaplin, Brecht, Huxley, Stravinsky, Geilgud, Olivier and Burton.

The author introduces material on the artist's early training in religious art, and establishes his passion for Barcelona and Catalan "modernisme". There are also portraits of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein who made up "The Picasso Gang". The book won the 1991 Whitbread biography award.

Benjamin is a scapegoat. Under the official title of Quality Controller, he works for the complaints department of a large Parisian department store where he bears the brunt of customer complaints. When a bomb goes off in the toy department, he finds himself the prime suspect.

Malaisea, the unhealthiest town in the whole of Zamonia, is home to Echo the Crat, a multitalented creature resembling a cat in appearance but capable of speaking any language under the sun, human or animal. When his mistress dies, Echo finds himself out on the street.

Talking to John McEnroe, his friends and his rivals, and drawing on a range of references, Tim Adams presents a book that is both a fan's-eye portrait of one of the most vivid players to pick up a tennis racket and a study of the idea of sporting obsession.

What is it, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle and wait for someone to light the fuse? Ask a few of the astronauts and find out. They had it. The first Americans in space, battling the Russians for control of the heavens, putting their lives on the line. This book is about the quality beyond bravery, beyond courage.

In addition to being a great composer, Igor Stravinsky was one of the most fascinating personalities of his time. The first volume of this definitive biography covers Stravinsky's life and work from his birth in 1882 through to 1934, with special focus on his Russian roots and his struggles to make his way in Switzerland and France.

Returning to Manchester, her broken home, Esther moves back to the flat she used to share with her best friend Donna. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, with her past life safely taped up in stacked cardboard boxes, she proceeds to turn her back on a 'real world' that seems meaningless and absurd.

A perceptive observation about the human race cleverly constructed and told with Desai's opulent vocabulary.

A richly imaginative novel of love, loss, time and the rise and fall of a great maritime empire, that sends two thwarted lovers spiralling through the chaos of history. Esperanca an illiterate peasant, a rich girl in Faro and a clever, bookish recluse who confronts a murderer in nineteenth-century Lisbon.

Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.

Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the great importance. This book uncovers Stubbs's origins and some of the secrets of his youth. By tracing the network of patronage and friendship through which George Stubbs operated, it describes the succession of animals, people, and ideas that inspired him.

Pierrot, a 15-year-old boy, stumbles across the murdered body of a local resistance hero one morning in 1945. He discovers a letter in the dead man's wallet, the contents of which unearth a series of dramatic events that in turn lead to Pierrot's association with Madame Henry.

Howard Marks was released after serving seven years of a twenty-five year sentence for marijuana smuggling. It was time for a change of career. So he wrote two best-selling books, stood as a parliamentary candidate, applied to become the country's Drug Czar, and embarked on a long-running sell-out series of one man shows.

Ursula Wong is the only child of a poor family and referred to by one member of the TV audience as 'half-breed trailer trash', not worth all the expense. But Ursula is the last of her family line and her story explodes into a gorgeous saga of culture, history and heredity.

There aren't many scientists famous enough in their lifetime to be canonized by the US Congress as one of America's 'living legends'. This book selects from across the full range of Gould's writing, including some of the most famous of his essays and extracts from his major books. The introduction sets both the essays and Gould's life in context.

At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world.