'God is dead', announced Nietzsche - before going on to abolish himself.Envious contemporaries of Nietzsche ridiculed him as a mad man - and yet they came closer than they knew in characterising a philosopher in whose thought ambivalence approximated to disintegration of the self.While the nineteenth century's coherent, consistent systems of certainty came crashing down ingloriously at the very first touch of the twentieth, Nietzsche's discourses survived. ...

Originally published in 1969, this was the first book of its kind: an attempt to describe the different approaches that the actor needs to make to different media – theatre, film and television – and to show how the art of acting, which never stops evolving had entered into a new phase of growth in the sixties. Ronald Hayman examines questions which are basic, but had often been ignored: What exactly goes on inside the actor’s mind while (s)he is preparing a part? How much do actors vary i...

Originally published in 1973, this book investigates the power and the pressures behind English theatre in the late 20th Century, analysing its structure and systems, and the way that money and motives flow through it. On the one hand there are the organisations: the big national companies, the West End managements, the regional repertory theatres, the ‘fringe’ groups, the trade unions, the Arts Council. On the other are the individuals: actors, directors, playwrights, agents, administrato...

Günter Grass is one of the writers who grew up in a Germany already in the grip of Nazism. None of them has found better ways than his of translating the sordid history of the movement into fiction; none has looked more critically at the ‘denazification’ and reconstruction of Germany. In this important study, originally published in 1985, Ronald Hayman scrutinizes Grass’s development and assesses his achievement. He finds that Grass’s more recent work does not fulfil the promise of the

Originally published in 1970, this account of Tolstoy’s achievement as a novelist concentrates on the best known of his works, in particular the two masterpieces Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Extracts are, however, taken from all the major novels and are arranged chronologically to demonstrate the development of his technique. The main part of the book is concerned with narrative method and analyses Tolstoy’s treatment of character, landscape and dialogue together with...

Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) proclamou: "Deus está morto". Neste ensaio, Hayman mostra a atualidade deste pensador em suas várias e contraditórias vozes – uma sensibilidade falando persuasivamente sobre o paradoxo como única verdade; a pluralidade como única consistência; a fragmentação como única integridade. E revela um novo Nietzsche para uma era nova, pós-moderna.

The complete Series 1 and 2 of the BBC Radio sitcom about the ups and downs of a second-class writerOnce upon a time, there was a struggling writer named Woodhouse Carton, who tried to make his name as an author while simultaneously running his own creative writing class...Over 12 episodes, we follow the frustrated scribe's fruitless search for fame and fortune as, supported by his long-suffering wife Gila and feckless sidekick Seamus, he tries to write the...