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...

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...

A The Tablet Book of the YearLast Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphael's compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells.Its inti...

June 1978: Frederic Raphael is in a studio for the dubbing of his television play Something's Wrong, and a routine moment is captured by his wry alertness to vanities and foibles. Ifs and Buts continues the sharply stylish extracts from the journal of time spent, in the words of The Sunday Times, 'with one eye on life's greasy pole and the other on the eternal verities'. Both, for Raphael, are subjects for curiosity, scepticism and entertainment. Ifs and Buts includes encounters with David...

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...

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...

My notebooks are my conscience,' writes Frederic Raphael. 'They contain a writer's letters to himself.' This second volume of his notebooks covers the first three years of the 1970s: years of slump, treacheries and deceits in the film world, of literary achievement and private tragi-comedies - the storm that washes away weeks of hard work in the garden of the Raphaels' French farmhouse, the serious accident in which his father nearly dies, before being unexpectedly restored to alarmingly i...

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, ...

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.

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.