This wonderful translation of Dream Story will allow a fresh generation of readers to enjoy this beautiful, heartless and baffling novella. Dream Story tells how through a simple sexual admission a husband and wife ware driven apart into rival worlds of erotic revenge.

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to train myself to notice things as they were'. He continues this practice today, though the word 'things' has come to embrace more or less everything that matters in the writer's world. These not...

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. "Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written," as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review, these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide...

A writer's wry observations about the glamorous worlds of Hollywood and literary London during the second half of the 1970s are offered in this autobiography. Though Frederic Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the rich and famous and has little interest in names and gossip, he notices and comments on the discrepancies between public and private faces to convey the texture of life around him. His notebooks, never originally intended for publication but contained in this compilation...

Charlie Marsden has to come to terms with a woman whom he cannot help but love unconditionally but who can never quite be his in this portrait of a vanishing generationWho is Katya Lowell and what is the secret of her life? A beautiful, seemingly cool painter of unnerving images in 1970s London, she comes to the attention of Charlie Marsden, an aristocrat who works at an old merchant bank in the City. Why does this elegant, enigmatic woman choose to spend time with ...

Karl Popper 1902-1994The political history of the twentieth century has been full of savage 'certainties'. A similar idea of history warranted the callous savageries of both Marxism and Fascism. They shared a faith in what Karl Popper called 'Historicism': the belief that the future could be predicted and that man had to align himself with its bloody progress.Totalitarianism, Popper maintained, was based on ideas implicit in Western philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and Marx....

From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37–c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world.Joseph ben Mattathias’s transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal...

Mixing observations about friends and family with short sketches and literary gossip, this third installment of the author's notebooks updates an intriguing personal and cultural record. Starting where Rough Copy: Personal Terms II left off, the story of one contemporary writer's life is resumed in anecdotes, aphorisms, journal entries, reviews, and vignettes of people and places.

Spanning the first five years of the 1970s, this installment of Frederic Raphael's view of his own life is at once intimate and detached, a detachment made palpable by months spent in the French farmhouse he purchased at the end of the booming 1960s. Although seemingly poised to direct and write many more films, the slump of the 1970s instead leaves the writer free to concentrate on fiction again. Lesser-known personalities whose unguarded stories and characters provide fodder for inspirat...

Witty and stylish, these extracts from Frederic Raphael's journal chronicle the life and reflections of the screenwriter. Of special interest to film enthusiasts, this candid memoir includes encounters with David Garnett and Rebecca West—and their vivid recollections of H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, and London's Bloomsbury—in addition to accounts of working with Diana Dors and almost working with Diane Keaton. Offering a behind-the-scenes look into the world of moviemaking,...

Compulsively readable, wise, and mischievous by turns, this sixth volume from the collection of Frederic Raphael's personal journals chronicles his eventful life in the seemingly glamorous worlds of 1980s Hollywood and literary London. Included are his encounters with Mary Whitehouse and Meryl Streep, vital memories of Dirk Bogarde, and warm reflections on Peter Sellers. Postwar British values and Byron's sex life are subjected to scrutiny; and there are acute portraits of Robert Redford, ...

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little PriceAt the whim of Dionysos, a son is torn to pieces by his own mother during the famous women-only Bacchanalian ritual. The story of revenge by the half-man half-god on Pentheus, King of Thebes, and all his people.This version of Euripides' Bacchae is translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael.