Edition: 1st HarperPerennial Ed
Publication date: 1992-04-30
Dewey code: 811.54
RRP: £13.35
Price: £10.31
Review Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 / HarperPerennial:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2000-04-06
Dewey code: 821.8
Price: £13.99
Review Tennyson (Oxford Authors) / Oxford Paperbacks:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-08-22
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £29.95
Price: £16.85
Review Dostoevsky: Mantle of the Prophet 1871-1881 v. 5 / Robson Books Ltd:
Creator: J.Lyndon Shanley
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1988-12
Dewey code: 813.303
RRP: £5.95
Price: £11.95
Review Walden (Writings of Henry D.Thoreau) / Princeton University Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2001-03-22
Dewey code: 820
RRP: £23.00
Price: £23.00
Review Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment / OUP Oxford:Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont) was born in 1689 into an extremely wealthy, well-connected family, and lived a long and extraordinary life. A proto-feminist, poet and wit, she was disinherited by her family, when she refused to marry the man her father picked for her ("Hell") and instead eloped, not with a passionately adored lover ("Paradise"), but with Edward Wortley Montagu-a rational choice ("Limbo"). The foremost champion of the practice of inoculation against smallpox- a medical advance she witnessed in Turkey, where, as the Ambassador's wife, she gained privileged and unprecedented access to Turkish society-Lady Mary's campaigning earned her equal portions of adulation and vilification. Indeed, as Isobel Grundy writes: "She was different, she was unique, she provoked delight or disgust, nothing in between. " And, in Alexander Pope, she famously provoked both. This 600-plus page biography provides a detailed, frequently entertaining, analysis of Lady Mary's extant texts: poems, correspondence, fiction, other prose and an up-close reading of her family life, travels and travails. But although this work is a triumph of research, Grundy doesn't step quite far enough back from her subject to fit her fully in context. It will, therefore, appeal more to the informed reader, who knows enough of the 18th century to paint in the backdrop, than to the general biography lover. -Lisa Gee.
Edition: Ill
Publication date: 2005-10-21
Dewey code: 823.914
RRP: £20.00
Price: £0.20
Review The Real Life of Anthony Burgess / Picador:
Creator: Robert Giroux
Publication date: 1994-04
Dewey code: 811.54
Price: £23.53
Review One Art: Letters / Farrar Straus Giroux:
Edition: 1st Da Capo Press Ed
Publication date: 2006-10-10
Dewey code: 895.635
Price: £17.99
Review Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend / Da Capo Press Inc:
Publication date: 2000-11-24
Dewey code: 782.42164092
RRP: £16.99
Price: £4.79
Review Chasing Down the Dawn: Life Stories / HarperCollins:
Creator: Chris Freeman
Publication date: 2002-06-06
Dewey code: 823.912
RRP: £17.99
Price: £7.19
Review Conversations with Christopher Isherwood (Literary Conversations (Paperback)) / University Press of Mississippi:
Publication date: 1988-07-15
Dewey code: 823.912
Price: £11.50
Review One Pair of Hands / Academy Chicago Publications:
Creator: Andrew McNeillie
Publication date: 1983-11
Dewey code: 828.91203
Price: £14.98
Review The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1931-1935: 4 (Diary of Virginia Woolf) / Harvest/HBJ Book:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1987-12
Price: £1.00
Review Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford Paperbacks) / Oxford Paperbacks:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2002-01-10
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £12.99
Price: £0.01
Review Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch / Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd:"Like being chained to a corpse, isn't it?" This is a memoir, not a biography, with obvious resonance. John Bayley, former Professor of English at Oxford, and Iris Murdoch, philosopher and author, have been married for more than 45 years. She has shown the degenerative effects of Alzheimer's Disease for the last four years. The words quoted above were not, needless to say, his. He chronicles a shared experience that can no longer be shared except with those outside of it, and as such is vital for him as he copes, rather than grieves. He purposefully blurs the boundaries of past and present as he describes the marriage of two brilliant intellectuals, determinedly unworldly and collegiate, mixing wine and water (they are serial dippers) throughout Europe as they serenely move "closer and closer apart". When Iris's intellect deteriorates her dependency inevitably increases, and they are "sailing into the dark" (her words) until the end of the book, when Bayley contends that the voyage is over, and they have both arrived somewhere. It is the spiritual answer to her perpetual question: "When are we going?", and provides a quietly uplifting resolution. John Bayley has written a magnificent paean to their love. Without underplaying the realities of living with someone with Alzheimer's, he writes in a moving and dignified way, without sentimentality, of a woman rather than a condition, who is still every bit his wife, if even more his dependent. [+]He believes that their marriage released the child in Iris; now they watch Teletubbies together, wordlessly secure. -David Vincent.
Publication date: 1999-12-01
RRP: £20.00
Price: £2.46
Review Prince Charming: A Memoir / Faber and Faber:Christopher Logue has had an extraordinary and varied career. After turbulent schooldays he was court-martialled out of the army for illegally being in possession of Pay books, and spent two years in a boot camp-except this was no ordinary boot-camp, but the Crusader castle of Acre. He sat in a dungeon and read Shakespeare. Later he lived in Paris and wrote pornography for a while, including such unforgettable works as Lust-which he doesn't recommend. Later still he was imprisoned again for his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and joined Private Eye producing the True Stories and Pseud's Corner columns for decades. His most important achievements have always been in poetry, though: his own work, and his brilliant, universally acclaimed translations of Homer. Logue is so honest, so hard on himself and his (admittedly plentiful) faults, that it can sometimes make you wince. But the honesty is also what makes this a brilliant self-portrait of a man at odds with the world, a natural drifter and bohemian, somehow contriving to survive in a difficult age, and produce some magnificent poetry along the way. -Christopher Hart.
Publication date: 2003-09-25
Dewey code: 813.54
Price: £14.99
Review Garbo Laughs / Counterpoint,U.S.:
Edition: 1st Touchstone Ed
Publication date: 2001-08-27
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £7.82
Price: £3.66
Review Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen / Simon & Schuster:
Creator: Simon Greaves
Edition: First
Publication date: 2005-06-30
RRP: £7.99
Price: £4.95
Review A Midsummer Night's Dream: In Comic Book Form (Comic Book Shakespeare) / Timber Frame Publications Ltd:
Creator: Desmond Graham
Publication date: 2000-10-26
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £14.95
Price: £8.41
Review The Letters of Keith Douglas / Carcanet Press Ltd:
Publication date: 2000-05-01
Dewey code: 850
RRP: £6.99
Price: £5.59
Review Curzio Malaparte: The Narrative Contract Strained (Hull Italian texts) / Troubador Publishing:
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Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Tennyson (Oxford Authors), Dostoevsky: Mantle of the Prophet 1871-1881 v. 5, Walden (Writings of Henry D.Thoreau), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, One Art: Letters, Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, Chasing Down the Dawn: Life Stories, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood (Literary Conversations (Paperback)), One Pair of Hands, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1931-1935: 4 (Diary of Virginia Woolf), Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford Paperbacks), Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, Prince Charming: A Memoir, Garbo Laughs, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, A Midsummer Night's Dream: In Comic Book Form (Comic Book Shakespeare), The Letters of Keith Douglas, Curzio Malaparte: The Narrative Contract Strained (Hull Italian texts) |
