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...

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...

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.

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.

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Personal Terms, was greeted in the TLS as 'a small masterpiece'. With the publication of Cuts and Bruises, the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. Cuts and Bruises concerns the 1970s, during which Raphael travelled widely (not least to Hollywood, which yields a mordantly sweet and sour account of figures such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John Schlesinger) and wrote the acclaimed tel...

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Ticks and Crosses covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of Ticks and Crosses are an account of a farcical sum...

We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as 'Byr- ' when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron's, ...

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 f...

In the twelfth century, Pope Clement III declared: 'The Pope is resolved to be the lord and master of the world's game.' Yet history has proven to be much more complex.In this epic narrative, Frederic Raphael explores the most significant moments, ideas and figures that have shaped the world's stage. He takes us on a journey through history: from the reigns of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, to Plato and Socrates and the origins of philosophy, the turning point of World War ...

Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are top friends of his. Why, then, is he left to languish in the grand hotel owned by Verdugo, which in Spanish means executioner? What is the relationship between Victor, who can write equally well with left hand or right, and Dr Jekyll and Mr ...