Edition: Lrg
Publication date: 2000-11
Dewey code: 828.91403
Price: £17.56
Review Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (Thorndike Biography) / Thorndike Press:"At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest" wrote Samuel Johnson, and bestselling crime writer P. D. James took this maxim as a challenge, setting out to record "one year that otherwise might be lost". The result is a fascinating and reflective account, part diary and part memoir, of one very full year of Baroness James' life, interspersed with her memories and intelligent analysis of "what it was like to be born two years after the end of the First World War and to live for seventy-eight years in this tumultuous century". P. D. James grew up in Cambridge between the wars and worked in the Home Office in the forensic and criminal justice departments, which sparked her interest in this area, though she did not become a published novelist until 1962 with Cover Her Face. She began to write full time after her "retirement" in 1979 and along the way became a Governor of the BBC, before taking a seat in the House of Lords in 1991. Time to be in Earnest is a lucid and penetrative work by one of the most influential figures currently involved with the Arts in Britain. P. [+]D. James reveals her vast scope for enjoyment, interest and simply getting on with life-her husband Connor White died aged 44 in 1964 after years of mental illness-whether it be spending time with her children and grandchildren, musing on the hideous British architectural mistakes of the 1960s or giving her view of the controversies continually surrounding the running of the BBC. At an age when many people would be considering slowing down, P. D. James seems constantly on the move, recording her day-to-day existence and her past with an alert and judicious eye. "I am sustained by the magnificent irrationality of faith" she states, "I inhabit a different body, but I can reach back over nearly 70 years and recognise her as myself. Then I walked in hope-and I do so still". -Catherine Taylor.
Creator: Angela Carter
Publication date: 1992-08-24
RRP: £18.95
Price: £18.95
Review Death Is No Obstacle / Savoy Books:
Publication date: 2001-05-03
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £25.00
Price: £10.50
Review John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit / Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.:
Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed
Publication date: 1920-01-01
Dewey code: 818.5409
Price: £8.99
Review Running in the Family (Vintage International) / Vintage Books:
Publication date: 2004-06-15
Dewey code: 811.54
RRP: £22.99
Price: £11.25
Review Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde / W. W. Norton & Co.:
Publication date: 2003-07-01
RRP: £19.99
Price: £4.50
Review Captain Marryat / Chatham Publishing:
Creator: Kelvin Corcoran
Publication date: 2008-06-15
Dewey code: 821
RRP: £8.95
Price: £6.20
Review Not the Full Story -- Six Interviews with Lee Harwood / Shearsman Books:
Publication date: 1983-03-17
Dewey code: 940.531503924
RRP: £22.00
Price: £18.99
Review Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust: The First Original Hasidic Tales in a Century / OUP USA:
Publication date: 2004-06-10
Dewey code: 821.8
RRP: £20.00
Price: £1.40
Review Robert Browning: A Life After Death / Weidenfeld & Nicolson:
Creator: Barbara Harshav
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1998-11-01
Dewey code: 811
RRP: £13.99
Price: £2.78
Review Yehuda Amichai a Life of Poetry 1948-1994 / HarperCollins (USA):
Publication date: 2006-03-25
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.15
Review Matilda Betham-Edwards: Novelist, Travel Writer and Francophile / Hastings Press:
Creator: Rosemary M. Magee
Publication date: 1987-02-01
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £13.50
Price: £7.80
Review Conversations with Flannery O'Connor (Literary Conversations) / University Press of Mississippi:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-03-31
Dewey code: 821
Price: £8.99
Review William Wordsworth: A Biography / Sutton Publishing Ltd:
Publication date: 2001-08-31
Dewey code: 813.52
RRP: £34.50
Price: £32.77
Review Jack London's Women / University of Massachusetts Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1998-10-01
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.90
Review Flaws in the Glass / Vintage:
Creator: June Barrie
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2000-06
Dewey code: 790
RRP: £48.12
Price: £48.12
Review Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:"At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest" wrote Samuel Johnson, and bestselling crime writer P. D. James took this maxim as a challenge, setting out to record "one year that otherwise might be lost". The result is a fascinating and reflective account, part diary and part memoir, of one very full year of Baroness James' life, interspersed with her memories and intelligent analysis of "what it was like to be born two years after the end of the First World War and to live for seventy-eight years in this tumultuous century". P. D. James grew up in Cambridge between the wars and worked in the Home Office in the forensic and criminal justice departments, which sparked her interest in this area, though she did not become a published novelist until 1962 with Cover Her Face. She began to write full time after her "retirement" in 1979 and along the way became a Governor of the BBC, before taking a seat in the House of Lords in 1991. Time to be in Earnest is a lucid and penetrative work by one of the most influential figures currently involved with the Arts in Britain. P. [+]D. James reveals her vast scope for enjoyment, interest and simply getting on with life-her husband Connor White died aged 44 in 1964 after years of mental illness-whether it be spending time with her children and grandchildren, musing on the hideous British architectural mistakes of the 1960s or giving her view of the controversies continually surrounding the running of the BBC. At an age when many people would be considering slowing down, P. D. James seems constantly on the move, recording her day-to-day existence and her past with an alert and judicious eye. "I am sustained by the magnificent irrationality of faith" she states, "I inhabit a different body, but I can reach back over nearly 70 years and recognise her as myself. Then I walked in hope-and I do so still". -Catherine Taylor.
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1977-09-05
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £6.99
Price: £9.95
Review World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender / Faber and Faber:
Publication date: 1991-05-09
Dewey code: 831.6
RRP: £25.00
Price: £169.80
Review Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Poetry of Desire, 1749-90 v. 1 (Goethe, the Poet of the Age) / Clarendon Press:
Edition: 1st
Publication date: 2007-04-01
Dewey code: 821.912
RRP: £18.95
Price: £9.90
Review Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and His Finest Work / Peter Owen Ltd:
Publication date: 2001-02
Dewey code: 823.7
Price: £13.41
Review Jane Austen (Penguin Lives Biographies) / Viking Penguin:It is a source of perennial frustration to Jane Austen's admirers that so little is known about her quiet existence as an unmarried woman with no outlet for her ferocious intelligence in genteel, rural England at the turn of the 19th century. Carol Shields, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Stone Diaries, has already proved herself a writer who can convey large truths with an economical amount of material, which makes her an excellent choice as Austen's biographer. Shields' brief but cogent text makes persuasive connections between Austen's novels and her life (the plethora of unsatisfactory mothers, for example, and the obvious sympathy for women barred from marriage by poverty and from careers by social custom), but she never forgets that fiction expresses first and foremost an artist's response to the world around her, not actual personal history. In fact, Shields argues, it may well have been Austen's sense that the novels she loved to read didn't provide a very accurate picture of the society she knew that fired her own work. Her merciless portraits of the economic underpinnings of marriage and family relations are in many ways more "realistic" than male writers' dramas of battle or females' fantasies of romantic bliss. As for her life's lack of incident, its one major disruption, her parents' move to Bath, prompted a nine-year silence from their formerly prolific daughter. Shields gleans as much as she can from Austen's letters, while remembering that they too gave voice to a persona not the whole truth, to delineate a quirky, sometimes cranky, sometimes catty woman who was by no means the perfect maiden aunt her surviving relatives sought to immortalise. An Austen biography will never be as much fun as an Austen novel, but Shields does a remarkably entertaining job of discerning the links between the two. -Wendy Smith.
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Models & Brands:
Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (Thorndike Biography), Death Is No Obstacle, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit, Running in the Family (Vintage International), Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, Captain Marryat, Not the Full Story -- Six Interviews with Lee Harwood, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust: The First Original Hasidic Tales in a Century, Robert Browning: A Life After Death, Yehuda Amichai a Life of Poetry 1948-1994, Matilda Betham-Edwards: Novelist, Travel Writer and Francophile, Conversations with Flannery O'Connor (Literary Conversations), William Wordsworth: A Biography, Jack London's Women, Flaws in the Glass, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography: Complete & Unabridged, World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender, Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Poetry of Desire, 1749-90 v. 1 (Goethe, the Poet of the Age), Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and His Finest Work, Jane Austen (Penguin Lives Biographies) |
