Revised Third Edition, 2026

How modernist women writers used biographical writing to resist their exclusion from literary historyIt’s impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. The Passion Projects examines biographical projects that moderni

How modernist women writers used biographical writing to resist their exclusion from literary history

It’s impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. The Passion Projects examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others.

Melanie Micir explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes’s fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson’s collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf’s joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field.

Arguing for the importance of biography, The Passion Projects shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.

This journal takes the reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to the South Sea Islands. It displays Darwin’s speculative mind at work, posing searching questions about the complex relations between the Earth’s structure, animal forms, anthropology and the origins of life itself.

With an Introduction by David Amigoni.

Charles Darwin’s travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world’s beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences’.

Yet in a travel journal which takes the reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to South Sea Islands, Darwin’s descriptive powers are constantly challenged, but never once overcome. In addition, The Voyage of the Beagle displays Darwin’s powerful, speculative mind at work, posing searching questions about the complex relation between the Earth’s structure, animal forms, anthropology and the origins of life itself.

With wit, colour and clarity, What A Wonderful World quickly and painlessly brings us up to speed on how the world of the 21st century works.

With wit, colour and clarity, What A Wonderful World quickly and painlessly brings us up to speed on how the world of the 21st century works. From economics to physics and biology to philosophy, Marcus Chown explains the complex forces that shape our universe.

Why do we breathe? What is money? How does the brain work? Why did life invent sex? Does time really exist? How does capitalism work – or not, as the case may be? Where do mountains come from? How do computers work? How did humans get to dominate the Earth? Why is there something rather than nothing?

In What a Wonderful World, Marcus Chown, bestselling author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and the Solar System app, uses his vast scientific knowledge and deep understanding of extremely complex processes to answer simple questions about the workings of our everyday lives. Lucid, witty and hugely entertaining, it explains the basics of our essential existence, stopping along the way to show us why the Atlantic is widening by a thumbs’ length each year, how money permits trade to time travel why the crucial advantage humans had over Neanderthals was sewing and why we are all living in a giant hologram.