This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least for correspondents in the twenty-first century, is that Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein have never met, nor even spoken to each other. But what is most rare about this book is the authors' abundant talent for entertaining their readers, as much when the topic is grave as when it ...

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved.In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, Sheilah Graham met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a party in Hollywood. Graham, a British-born journalist, broke off her engagement, and until Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack in her apartment in 1940, the two writers lived the fervid, sometimes ...

Many bright minds have come up with expressions we now take for granted as part of the English language, and which we use freely in vernacular speech. But the originators of many of our most useful second-hand remarks go uncredited. So who said it first? This collection sets out to credit as far as its possible to do so the people who actually created many familiar terms in common us. For example, poor Ernest Dowson is all but forgotten, but author Margaret Mitchell read his 1891 poem Non ...

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done…great fun to read." — New York Times Book ReviewA fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of biographical essays, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among o...

A thought-provoking journey inside the minds of the world’s most accomplished storytellers, from Shakespeare to Stephen KingNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SPECTATOR • “Richard Cohen’s book acted as a tonic to me. It didn’t make me more Russian, but it fired up my imagination. I have never annotated a book so fiercely.”—Hilary Mantel“There are three rules for writing a novel,” Somerset Maugham is said to have said. “...

“It is Johnson’s gift that he can make his subjects human and fallible enough that we would…recognize them instantly, while also illuminating what made them heroes.” —Washington Post Book World on Heroes“Johnson is a clear, intelligent, forceful writer, and nothing if not thorough.” —Wall Street JournalPaul Johnson, the acclaimed author of Creators, Heroes, and the New York Times bestseller Intellectuals, returns with a captivating collection of biographical portraits of th...

'Generous, enjoyable and well informed.' Observer**'500 expertly potted plots and personal comments on a wide range of pop and proper prose fiction.' The Times___________________________________________________________Ranging all the way from Aaron's Rod to Zuleika Dobson, via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch, literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very pers...

The bookshop is, and will always be, the soul of the trade. What happens there does not happen elsewhere. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show there than anywhere else, and I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires.A memoir of a life in the antiquarian book trade, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey between the shelves—and then b...

The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations contains over 8,000 quotations from 1914 to the present. As much a companion to the modern age as it is an entertaining and useful reference tool, it takes the reader on a tour of the wit and wisdom of the great and the good, from Margot Asquith to Monica Lewinsky, from George V to Boutros Boutros-Galli and Jonathan Aitken to Frank Zappa.

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...

'He's 100% political herpes. Back in six months whatever you do'Camilla Long on Nigel Farage'It's not enough to succeed. Friends must fail'Gore VidalNothing cuts deeper, or provides greater pleasure, than the perfect put-down.When it's directed at someone else.Matthew Parris's sublime collection of the rudest, funniest shin-kicks and barbs in human history, spa...

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic...