Böcker av Sarah LeFanu

In 2020 the former Women's Press editor and literary critic Sarah LeFanu published her group biography of three British writers and their travels to South Africa in the closing days of the Victorian era, Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War, which was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer is a journal that covers the five years (2015-2020) of her research and writing, taking her from libraries and archives in England to old battle sites in South Africa, and recording her conversations with the living and the dead. Talking to the Dead is about South Africa then and now, about Britain then and now, about imperialism and the beginning of its end, about the biographical process, and also, intertwined with these subjects, about the experience of living with the painful chronic condition polymyalgia rheumatica. For life writers, for lovers of historical biography, for all readers of Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle. Praise for Something of Themselves:'a splendidly well-written page-turner ... a classic' - Jan Montefiore'brilliantly insightful' - Lara Feigel 'highly original, thought-provoking ... sensitive, multi-layered' - Saul David

In 2003 the former Women's Press editor and critic Sarah LeFanu published her acclaimed biography of Rose Macaulay with Virago Press. Dreaming of Rose is a memoir of a woman juggling the demands of teaching, research and writing while patching together a living.

In early 1900, the paths of three British writers¿Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle¿crossed in South Africa, during what¿s become known as Britain¿s last imperial war. Each of the three had pressing personal reasons to leave England behind, but they were also motivated by notions of duty, service, patriotism and, in Kipling''s case, jingoism.Sarah LeFanu compellingly opens an unexplored chapter of these writers¿ lives, at a turning point for Britain and its imperial ambitions. Was the South African War, as Kipling claimed, a dress rehearsal for the Armageddon of World War One? Or did it instead foreshadow the anti-colonial guerrilla wars of the later twentieth century?Weaving a rich and varied narrative, LeFanu charts the writers¿ paths in the theatre of war, and explores how this crucial period shaped their cultural legacies, their shifting reputations, and their influence on colonial policy.

Samora Machel led FRELIMO, the Mozambican Liberation Front, to victory against Portuguese colonialism in 1974, and the following year became independent Mozambique's first President. This biography presents the many different faces of the man Nelson Mandela called 'a true African revolutionary'.