Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-08-22
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £11.99
Price: £2.75
Review Marquis de Sade: The Genius of Passion (Tauris Parke Paperbacks) / Tauris Parke Paperbacks:
Publication date: 2001-09-17
RRP: £24.99
Price: £22.16
Review Iris Murdoch: A Life - The Authorized Biography / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:In Iris: A Memoir, Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, charted in tender if often terrifying detail the writer and philosopher's final years battling against Alzheimer's Disease. Rather than duplicate Bayley, Peter Conradi's extensive and scholarly biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, wisely devotes the majority of its attention to exploring Murdoch's formative years. Conradi, a close friend whose dog was immortalised in one of Murdoch's novels, occasionally gets bogged down in minutia. (At one point he expends considerable energy and several footnotes discussing whether her prep school headmistress presented prizes with a wooden sword or a rolled-up piece of cardboard. ) On the whole though his painstaking attention to detail pays immense dividends; reminding us of the sheer inventiveness of Murdoch's work revealing that her life was if anything "more improbably packed with strange coincidences than her plots". Born into an unorthodox Irish Protestant family, she never lost her sense of being an outsider in England-a theme meditated upon in several of her finest novels. At Oxford University just before the Second World War she was a dedicated member of the Communist Party and an avowed bohemian. Stalin and a wartime spell in the civil service dimmed her commitment to Communism (in the 1980s she even voted Conservative) but she always remained a "free spirit". One former lover described her as being "monumentally unfaithful" and throughout her adult life she conducted numerous affairs with men and women. If her fictions sometimes presented interrelations of almost Shakespearean complexity, Murdoch's own trysts with Nobel Prizewinner Elias Canetti, the novelist Brigid Brophy and the philosopher Philippa Foot were no less dramatic. [+]Later she praised monogamy, attacking the very promiscuity of her youth. Conradi acknowledges rather than condemns Murdoch's contradictions, presenting us with a fallible, mercurial human being-the inspiring college lecturer who was sometimes too wrapped up in her own problems to teach; the advocate of tolerance who could be censorious; the existentialist who questioned freedom as a value in morals and the novelist who sought critical approval and yet was nauseated by praise. -Travis Elborough.
Publication date: 1993-07
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £11.42
Price: £18.17
Review Janette Oke: A Heart for the Prairie : The Untold Story of One of the Most Beloved Novelists of Our Time / Bethany House Pub:
Creator: Peter Porter
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-01-07
Dewey code: 709.2
RRP: £7.99
Price: £1.85
Review Life, Letters and Poetry (Oxford World's Classics) / Oxford Paperbacks:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2005-07-14
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £9.99
Price: £2.33
Review Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753-1778 / Atlantic Books:
Publication date: 2006-01-12
Dewey code: 823.809
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.74
Review Authors in Context: The Brontees (Oxford World's Classics) / OUP Oxford:
Publication date: 1995-02-23
RRP: £11.95
Price: £11.94
Review Wilfred Owen (Border Lines) / Seren:
Creator: Al Davis
Publication date: 2005-09-30
Dewey code: 822.33
RRP: £7.95
Price: £1.50
Review 101 Things You Didn't Know About Shakespeare: His Secret Loves! His Artistic Feuds! His Biggest Flops! / Adams Media Corporation:
Creator: "Flameboy"
Publication date: 2005-10-10
Dewey code: 741.5941
RRP: £10.95
Price: £3.06
Review Death Rap: Tupac Shakur - A Life / Omnibus Press:
Publication date: 1995-10-19
Price: £20.00
Review Dared and Done: Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning / Bloomsbury Publishing PLC:
Creator: C. Winston
Publication date: 1978-07-27
Price: £20.00
Review Letters to Friends / Calder Publications Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2005-11-25
Dewey code: 828.809
RRP: £18.00
Price: £4.00
Review Kipling / Haus Publishing Limited:
Edition: 2nd Revised edition
Publication date: 2006-06-05
RRP: £20.00
Price: £4.79
Review Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist / Little Books:
Publication date: 2005-09-01
RRP: £13.99
Price: £2.41
Review Shakespeare: Aspiring Spirit: From Stratford to London - (Birth, 1564 - C. 1590) v. 1: The Biography: Aspiring Spirit: From Stratford to London - (Birth, 1564 - C. 1590) v. 1 / Random House Audiobooks:
Publication date: 2003-10-06
RRP: £18.99
Price: £10.50
Review Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams / Headline Book Publishing:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-06
Dewey code: 848.91409
RRP: £10.95
Price: £4.73
Review The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography / Thames & Hudson Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2004-05-14
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £11.99
Price: £6.26
Review Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz - A Biographical Portrait: Bruno Schulz - A Biographical Portrait / W. W. Norton & Co.:
Authors
- Cheryl Quin
- Pauline Humphries
RRP: £18.99
Price: £18.99
Review Goodbye 13 Stone, Hello Life!: Pauline's Continuing Success Story Including Exercise and Weight Loss Workbook / Product Focus Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2001-04-23
Dewey code: 822
RRP: £10.99
Price: £1.49
Review Shakespeare: The Poet and His Plays (Methuen Literature): The Poet and His Plays (Biography and Autobiography) / Methuen Drama:
Edition: 1
Publication date: 2003-06-01
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £10.99
Price: £4.97
Review Highsmith: A Romance of the Fifties / Cleis Press:Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s begins like a brainy, romantic novel complete with exotic settings, fast-paced dialogue and a who's who of the 1950s New York literati. All this should not be surprising given that Marijane Meaker's tale of her two-year relationship with famed mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith comes from a pen that has crafted more than 40 works of fiction and non-fiction. Meaker's touch is light and clear. She backlights her memoir with glimpses of the New York scene of the era: the Mafia-controlled lesbian bars, the rise of Fire Island, the rage for Freudian psychoanalysis. She doesn't attempt a detailed literary biography, nor is the book a complete psychological portrait of Highsmith. But Meaker, a self-proclaimed lover of pseudonymous disguises, does peer beneath Highsmith's public mask to reveal her constant despair over a disapproving mother, her fascination/obsession with Germany and her discomfort around intellectuals. This, and Meaker's persistent jealousy and constant fear that her beloved Pat would leave her to write in Europe slowly edges the narrative into darker territory. Inevitably, the lovers part, and each author kills off the other, albeit in fictional form, with their first post-relationship murder mysteries. Meaker closes the book by describing her difficult 1992 reunion with Highsmith. Meaker depicts her ex-lover as a hard-drinking, grizzled, chain-smoking, bigoted woman recently returned from Europe and recovering from a bout of lung cancer. [+]Far from the bright beginnings of young love in the 1950s, this segment provides a depth absent from the earlier, more novelistic chapters and provides a glimpse of what a further, more complete biography might have to offer. -Patrick O'Kelley, Amazon. com.
| Browse Novelists, Poets & Playwrights:
Models & Brands:
Marquis de Sade: The Genius of Passion (Tauris Parke Paperbacks), Iris Murdoch: A Life - The Authorized Biography, Janette Oke: A Heart for the Prairie : The Untold Story of One of the Most Beloved Novelists of Our Time, Life, Letters and Poetry (Oxford World's Classics), Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753-1778, Authors in Context: The Brontees (Oxford World's Classics), Wilfred Owen (Border Lines), 101 Things You Didn't Know About Shakespeare: His Secret Loves! His Artistic Feuds! His Biggest Flops!, Death Rap: Tupac Shakur - A Life, Dared and Done: Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Letters to Friends, Kipling, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, Shakespeare: Aspiring Spirit: From Stratford to London - (Birth, 1564 - C. 1590) v. 1: The Biography: Aspiring Spirit: From Stratford to London - (Birth, 1564 - C. 1590) v. 1, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams, The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography, Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz - A Biographical Portrait: Bruno Schulz - A Biographical Portrait, Goodbye 13 Stone, Hello Life!: Pauline's Continuing Success Story Including Exercise and Weight Loss Workbook, Shakespeare: The Poet and His Plays (Methuen Literature): The Poet and His Plays (Biography and Autobiography), Highsmith: A Romance of the Fifties |
