Bloomsbury Continuum – The Bell Bookshop

This Dark Night

Emma — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades.Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there’s much that we don’t know about her — most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Deborah reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë’s days, bringing us closer to one of the greatest and fiercest writers we have, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art.This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister).Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily’s irrepressible spirit and wild imagination.

The Queer Thing About Sin

Emma — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

‘BOLD AND BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN’ Tom Holland’MY GOD, THIS BOOK IS NEEDED. HISTORY HAS NEVER SEEMED MORE ALIVE…’ Russell T DaviesA gripping new journey through ancient history, uncovering the origins of homophobia and the untold stories of those who dared to love.In the early days of ancient Greece, queer love was celebrated. The most famous warrior in antiquity loved another man, the poet whose lyrics were memorised by philosophers and kings sang of her desire for women. Men could swear oaths of undying love and live out the rest of their lives together in peace. What fragments survive of this ancient world all tell us one thing: it was not a sin to be queer.In this extraordinary book, Harry Tanner sets out on a journey to discover the origins of homophobia in the West. He follows the traces of this sinister idea as it swept across the ancient Mediterranean. Wherever he discovers the roots of homophobia taking hold, Tanner finds a confluence of crises mirrored across the centuries. Inequality, fear and an obsession with self-control – this is how societies turn on their queer citizens, time and time again, since the dawn of history.This is a powerful story that draws on the rich world of the ancients to reveal how homophobia infected Western religion and ideology – the consequences of which we are still living with today – and to that end how we can move forward and resist homophobia in the future.

Alight With Hidden Glory

Emma — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“The richness of [these] reflections will continue for a long time to be for us a source of blessing, of grace, of encounter with Jesus Christ.” Pope Leo XIVAlight with Hidden Glory brings together the reflections preached by Bishop Erik Varden to Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia at the 2026 Lent retreat.Informed by Scripture and the liturgy, illumined by the insights of Bernard of Clairvaux, a man who helped shape medieval Europe, the book addresses questions of timeless relevance: What is the meaning of freedom? How can we speak well about truth? How do we respond when high ideals are compromised by human betrayal? Erik Varden reveals Lent not as deprivation but as a clarifying pilgrimage toward Christ’s ‘hidden glory’. This contemplative yet urgent work invites readers to walk the exodus path with renewed courage, vigilance, and hope.

Robert Graves

Emma — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

‘An exemplary biography’ — Sunday Times’Commanding’ – Observer’Diligent and insightful’ – The TimesThis revelatory biography of Robert Graves re-examines his position as a major First World War poet, as well as a master prose writer.The writer and poet Robert Graves suppressed virtually all of the poems he had published during and just after the First World War. Until his son, William Graves, reprinted almost all the Poems About War in 1988, Graves’s status as a ‘war poet’ depended mainly on his prose memoir, Good-bye to All That. In this exemplary biography, Jean Moorcroft Wilson relates Graves’s fascinating early life, his experiences in the war, his being left for dead at the Battle of the Somme, his leap from a third-storey window after his lover Laura Riding’s even more dramatic jump from the fourth storey, his move to Spain and his final ‘goodbye’ to ‘all that’.Containing startling new archival material about the breakdown of the friendship between Robert Graves and the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, including photographs, Dr Moorcroft Wilson traces not only Graves’s compelling life, but also the development of his poetry during the First World War, his thinking about the conflict and his shifting attitude towards it.

What if Reform Wins

Emma — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

'Farage is Britain's new prime minister. Nirvana or nightmare? Whatever our reaction, we all need to take this scenario very seriously, as Peter Chappell's invigorating book does'
Anthony Seldon

'a dazzling imagined account of Nigel Farage’s first year in Number Ten: hilarious, terrifying and totally believable… Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.' Ferdinand Mount

A compulsive, chilling nonfiction thriller that imagines what might happen if Reform win a majority at the next general election.

At 10pm on 28th June 2029, exit polls predict that Nigel Farage will be the 60th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This is the story of what could happen next.

What If Reform Wins is a chilling and deeply researched scenario that takes us day-by-day, minute-by-minute through a world in which Reform has the opportunity to put their policies into practice, from deporting 600,000 people to leaving the ECHR, abandoning net zero and ending the BBC’s license fee. How will people fight back against mass deportations and fracking? And will this self-described ‘ill-disciplined pirate ship’ survive the rigors of government?

Drawing on dozens of new interviews, Peter Chappell, a reporter at The Times, explores a nation on a new and dystopian path.

The Illuminated Man

Emma — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book is about J. G. Ballard. This book is also about death, love and time travel.

J. G. Ballard possessed one of the most astonishing imaginations of our age, and he had an intense and turbulent history: a childhood spent in the encroaching shadow of World War II, teenage internment in a Japanese prison camp – an experience famously fictionalised in Empire of the Sun. Ballard’s novels are among the finest and most unusual fiction that has ever been published. Whether in the hyper-surrealism of High Rise or the erotic violence of Crash, he upended the morality and reality of our world.

Christopher Priest knew many of Ballard’s friends and colleagues personally. As a young writer, it had been Ballard’s stories, most of all, that had helped cement his passion for science fiction. With much of their early work published in the same magazines, Priest knew about Ballard’s world from the inside. He set out to write a biography that would make people understand what he already knew: that J. G. Ballard wasn’t just a cult writer – he was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

In 2024, Christopher died. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasised into the bones, the same disease that killed J. G. Ballard – the man whose biography he’d spent his last months working on.

When Nina and Christopher first met, they bonded over their love for Ballard’s writing, rereading his novels and stories together many times. When it became clear that Christopher would not have time to finish this biography, Nina promised him that she would complete it, patching together with her own voice the gaps that remained. If the book began as a tribute from Priest to Ballard, it is now also a love story written by Nina for Christopher. With access to never-before-seen material, The Illuminated Man explores the history and themes of Ballard’s life and – with Ballardian strangeness – celebrates and mourns for those that are gone.

This is the story of two deaths, three science fiction writers and one attempt to turn back time.

The Descent

Emma — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An extraordinary first-hand account of Russia’s descent into totalitarianism, paranoia and madness.Marc Bennetts, foreign correspondent for The Times and The Sunday Times, moved to Russia in the chaotic final years of President Yeltsin’s rule. Twenty-five years later, The Times pulled him out of Russia over concerns for his security following his arrest in Moscow at a protest against the war in Ukraine. From the “wild” 1990s in Moscow to narrowly escaping death under fire in Ukraine, The Descent is a unique and personal diary of how Russia spiraled into violent insanity. Bennetts witnessed the often-terrifying events in Russia up close, observing how the Kremlin’s ubiquitous propaganda warped minds and fomented hatred of Putin’s foes, at home and abroad, even among people close to him. After leaving Russia, he travelled in war-torn Ukraine, where he came face-to-face with the appalling consequences of this madness. Bennetts meets a vast array of characters, from pro-war Russian politicians, influential Russian Orthodox Church officials and aggressive Kremlin activists to opposition figures and a Siberian shaman who tried to “exorcise” Putin, as well as Russians who took up arms to fight Moscow’s invading forces. In this extraordinary panorama, Marc Bennetts shows in frightening detail how a society can lose its mind, and how easily a power-hungry leader can reshape an entire country in his own malevolent image.

Solidarity

Emma — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Celebrated thinker Rowan Williams explores the shared burdens and hopes that make solidarity possible.From its use as a rallying cry by the labour movement to its central place in struggles for racial justice, the ideaof solidarity is often invoked as the answer to inequality and conflict. And yet, as both a term and a practice,solidarity is tantalizingly slippery. We are encouraged to ‘show solidarity’, but how can we truly realize it?As Rowan Williams argues in this impassioned book, solidarity is not something fixed to be achieved, but a process of mutual recognition. From its origins in the French Revolution to the Nueva Solidaridad in Mexico City and the Solidarnosc movement in Poland, Williams traces solidarity’s myriad forms through its deep influence on Catholic social thought, its transformation in the hands of thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jan Patocka and the creative struggle so central to the writings of Gillian Rose.He reveals solidarity to be a constant exercise in self-scrutiny and dialogue in which we find that true recognitionlies not in asserting that others are ‘just like us,’ but rather in affirming their claim to be ‘fully themselves’. It is in this work of recognition, this possibility of communion, that true hope can be found.

Emperor of the Seas

Emma — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Astonishing…Brings to life a thriving – and rather civilized – empire” – The Telegraph”sparkles with energy, insight and passion… difficult to put down.” Nicholas Morton, BBC History MagazineControl the sea, and you control everything…a gripping tale of dynastic rivalry and innovation, from the author of the classic work Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life. Kublai Khan is one of history’s most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world’s largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire. By the end of his reign, the Chinese were building and supplying remarkable ships to transport men, grain, and weapons over vast distances, of a size and dexterity that would be inconceivable in Europe for hundreds of years. Khan had come to a brilliant realization: control the sea, and you control everything. A master storyteller with an unparalleled grasp of Mongol sources, Jack Weatherford shows how Chinese naval hegemony changed the world forever – revolutionizing world commerce and transforming tastes as far away as England and France.