3JJG Archives - Duckworth Books

The Quality of Love

‘Oh, what lives they both led!’ Spectator

‘Enriched by the correspondence between the twins – for, ultimately, the great love story is theirs alone’ Telegraph

A TLS Book of the Year

When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine. This correspondence charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their friends and lovers, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir, and George Orwell.

Out of this rich archive, The Quality of Love weaves the story of these captivating and unusually beautiful identical twins who overcame a meagre education to take 1930s London society by storm and move among Europe’s foremost intellectuals during the twentieth century’s most dramatic decades. Above all, it is a sparkling portrait of the deep connection between two spirited sisters.

The British

A fondness for laughing at our own anecdotes. An assertion of the importance of tea. A weakness for oak beams. A keen interest in the weather. A tendency to ‘become doggy’. The British haven’t changed much since the 1930s, when Pont’s first witty and hilarious observations on the national character appeared in Punch magazine.

Pont’s plump rolling-pin wielding cooks and solar-topee’d imperialists capture a distinct moment in British inter-war history, but his observations of character are timeless. In the nursery, at the opera, or in the bath, in tweed or tennis whites or bowler hat, Pont conjures distinct, complete personalities with a few strokes of his pen.

Charming, idiosyncratic and – above all – wonderfully funny, this unforgettable collection will bring Pont’s extraordinary talent to a new generation of fans.

Sinners of Starlight City

FROM INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR ANIKA SCOTT

Madame Mystique is a performer extraordinaire, come to work her scandalous magic at the glittering 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Of African American and Sicilian heritage, Mystique – aka Rosa Mancuso – and her fellow performers move on the margins. Her ambiguous status serves a hidden vendetta: she awaits the arrival of Paolo Amanta, the dashing pilot sent by Mussolini to dazzle spectators with a phenomenal air show.

Back in Sicily, Paolo’s band of young Fascists had murdered her relatives as the old Mafia families were swept from their palazzi with unsparing brutality. Rosa is fixed on revenge. Then her estranged cousin, Mina, comes to the Fair, begging her help to face down their American family. Sinners of Starlight City is an immersive story of injustice, retribution and redemption that asks: who decides who we are and where we belong?

Tiger Woman

Dancer, singer, gang member, cocaine addict and artist’s favourite: Betty May – aka the Tiger Woman – was a woman like no other.

Born into abject poverty in Limehouse, Betty May used her striking looks and fierce street nous to become an unlikely bohemian celebrity sensation between the wars. A model and muse for artists and writers including Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Jacob Kramer and David Garnett, May elbowed her way to the top of London’s social scene in a succession of outrageous and dramatic fights, flights, marriages and misadventures that also took her to France, Italy, Canada and the USA.

Tiger Woman is her incredible story in her own words, as vivid and extraordinary as the day it was first told.

The Shadowy Third

Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author’s grandparents – the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair.

For readers who were swept up in Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey and Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting.

A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age, they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House – Julia’s grandfather.

So begins a life-changing quest to understand the affair, which had profound repercussions for Julia’s family, not least her grandmother, Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War II. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, The Shadowy Third opens up a world with complex attitudes to love and sex, duty and ambition, and to writing itself.

Everyman’s England

A classic travelogue that brilliantly conjures 1930s Britain.

In this series of pen-portraits of England from the 1930s, Victor Canning ‘evocatively captures the pattern and colour of English life’ (The Bookseller), from Cumbria to Cornwall. Canning’s heart-warming and humorous observations of sleepy villages, pastoral scenes and busy industries are a delightful time capsule into life in England during the interwar years.

‘What does the word England mean to you? To all of us England means something different, and yet I think there is for every man and woman some little corner which is more England than anywhere else…’

Revolution in Mind

How did Freudian Theory come together as a body of ideas, and how did these ideas attract followers who spread this model of mind throughout the West? Makari contextualises Freud’s early psychological work amid the great changes occurring in late-nineteenth-century European science, philosophy, and medicine, showing how Freud was a creative, inter-disciplinary synthesizer whose immersion in pre-existing domains of study led to the creation of Freudian Theory.

He looks at how Freud’s followers built a heterogeneous movement in the years leading to 1914, at the growth of the movement, and its subsequent collapse with the departures of Bleuler, Jung and Adler. Finally, Makari examines the critical, but neglected, Weimar period, when there was an attempt to rebuild a more pluralistic psychoanalytic community. This reformation resulted in the broader theoretical reach of psychoanalysis and its greater acceptance across the Western world outside Europe, where the rise of fascism was to lead to the destruction of psychoanalysis and the culture that once sustained it.

The Dardanelles Disaster

The British Navy’s failed attempt to capture Constantinople and secure a sea route to Russia in 1915 marked a turning point of World War I. Acclaimed naval military historian Dan van der Vat argues that the disaster at the Dardanelles not only prolonged the war for two years and brought Britain to the brink of starvation, but also led to the Russian Revolution and contributed to the rapid destabilisation of the Middle East.

With a narrative rich in human drama, ‘The Dardanelles Disaster’ highlights the diplomatic clashes from Whitehall to the Hellespont, Berlin to Constantinople, and St Petersburg to the Bosporus. Van der Vat analyzes then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s response to the obstacles he faced and describes the fateful actions of the Turkish, German, and British governments throughout the Gallipoli Campaign. With detailed analysis of the battle’s events and never-before-published information on the German navy’s mine laying operations, ‘The Dardanelles Disaster’ tells a forgotten story from a fresh viewpoint, shedding light on one of World War I’s most pivotal moments – and in particular on one avoidable and monumental blunder.

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