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This edition does not include illustrations.A new biography of one of the most intrepid, romantic and fascinating of the great nineteenth-century travellers.Explorer, scholar, travel writer and poet, Charles Doughty was one of the great 19th-century adventurers. In the 1870s he spent two years wandering through Arabia, first with the Haj pilgrimage, then joining nomadic bands of Arabs. Unyielding in his independence of mind, the tall, red-bearded Doughty’s aggressive refusal to conceal his Christianity made his travels all the more dangerous: he was threatened with death several times, spurned, insulted and often beaten by angry mobs.The story of his archaeological investigations and his wide-ranging observations of Arabia and desert life were published in 1888 as the famous Arabia Deserta. Although feted by the literary establishment, Doughty often found himself at odds with the authorities, his work rejected and his genius (as he saw it) neglected. His long, impassioned and often paradoxical life make him one of the great British scholar-eccentrics.

A rich historical biography of ‘those wicked wicked Wyndhams’ – three beautiful, cultured aristocratic sisters born into immense wealth in late Victorian Britain.Mary, Madeline and Pamela – the three Wyndham sisters – were raised surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, in a family famed for its bohemian closeness. The liberal upbringing of these handsome, intelligent daughters of a maverick politician and an artistic but emotionally unstable mother prompted one family to forbid their offspring ever to play with ‘those wild Wyndham children’.In adulthood, the sisters became intimate with ‘the Souls’, an intellectual and flirtatious aristocratic set, whose permissive beliefs scandalised society. Eldest and youngest sister became the objects of press fascination as the confidantes of great statesman – Mary of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour; Pamela of the Liberal politician Edward Grey. Madeline had the only happy marriage of the three.Their lives were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day: Oscar Wilde, who fell in love with their cousin Bosie Douglas; Marie Stopes, to whom Pamela became patron; and the iconoclast poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, lover both of Mary and her mother before her. Their lives would be irrevocably devastated by the horrors of the First World War.In their first ever biography, Claudia Renton, drawing on a rich archive of letters, charts these women’s intimate stories in their own voices, from romantic beginnings through the passions and disappointments of womanhood to the tragedy that brought a definitive end to their era, against the backdrop of the political and social events that shaped their age. Those Wild Wyndhams is an unforgettable historical biography that captures the high drama of this grand family against the political and social events that shaped their age.