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Books > Biography > Literary

The End of the End of the Earth - Essays (Paperback, International ed.): Jonathan Franzen The End of the End of the Earth - Essays (Paperback, International ed.)
Jonathan Franzen 1
R566 R97 Discovery Miles 970 Save R469 (83%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days
The Sea Dreamer - A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad (Hardcover): Gerard Jean-Aubry The Sea Dreamer - A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad (Hardcover)
Gerard Jean-Aubry
R3,492 Discovery Miles 34 920 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Of Joseph Conrad, H.L. Mencken has written: 'There was something almost suggesting the vastness of a natural phenomenon. He transcended all the rules. There have been perhaps, greater novelists, but I believe that he was incomparably the greatest artist whoever wrote a novel.' Originally published in 1957, the year of the centenary of Conrad's birth, and although he was firmly established among the world's great literary figures, little was known about him generally, beyond the fact that he was himself once a sailor, and that the language he handled with such mastery was not the one to which he was born. This was described as the definitive biography, written by one of Conrad's closest friends, to whom the novelist willed his personal papers. It took many years to prepare and the author travelled extensively in the lands that Conrad knew and wrote about. He writes with clarity, compassion and understanding of Conrad's childhood in Russia (where the father was exiled for Polish nationalist activities); of how the youth of fifteen, who had never seen the sea before, became a sailor; of how at twenty-nine he became a British subject and master of his own ship; of how in 1894 he became a novelist almost by accident, rose rapidly to literary fame, found new friends and established himself in literary history. This is a record of the strangest and most enigmatic of lives, fascinating and authoritative at the same time.

Hidden Wyndham - Life, Love, Letters (Paperback): Amy Binns Hidden Wyndham - Life, Love, Letters (Paperback)
Amy Binns; Photographs by John Wyndham
R337 R306 Discovery Miles 3 060 Save R31 (9%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

Until now, little was known of John Wyndham. Despite his popularity, his obsessive need for privacy led to him being known as "the invisible man of science fiction". He redefined the genre with dystopian classics The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos. In Hidden Wyndham, Amy Binns reveals the woman who was the inspiration for his strong-minded heroines. Their secret love affair sustained this gentle and desperately shy man through failure, war, and, ultimately, success. Hidden Wyndham shows how Wyndham's own disturbing war experiences - witnessing the destruction of London in the Blitz then as part of the invading British army in France and Germany - inspired and underlay his dystopian masterpieces. It provides an insight into the lives of men and women who refused to live by the oppressive rules of society in the mid-20th century. Many extracts from his letters are included, along with his own photographs. "Put your hand on your heart sometimes, my lovely, and tell yourself that it is mine. An era had shut up its houses and gone away, perhaps forever. But we had that little much longer. How cruel the macrocosm, sweet, but how sweet the microcosm. Oh, my darling."

The Dark Interval - Letters for the Grieving Heart (Hardcover): Rainer Maria Rilke The Dark Interval - Letters for the Grieving Heart (Hardcover)
Rainer Maria Rilke; Translated by Ulrich Baer 1
R386 R312 Discovery Miles 3 120 Save R74 (19%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

From one of the most famous poets in history comes a new selection of writings to bereaved friends and acquaintances, providing comfort in a time of grief and words to soothe the soul.

Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke addressed letters to individuals who were close to him, who had contacted him after reading his works, or whom he had met briefly - anyone with whom he felt an inner connection. Within his vast correspondence, there are about two dozen letters of condolence. In these direct, personal and practical letters, Rilke writes about loss and mortality, assuming the role of a sensitive, serious and uplifting guide through life's difficulties. He consoles a friend on the loss of her nephew, which she experienced like the loss of her own child; a mentor on the death of her dog; and an acquaintance struggling to cope with the end of a friendship. The result is a profound vision of mourning and a meditation on the role of pain in our lives, as well as a soothing guide for how to get through it.

Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation...

Winifred Gerin - Biographer of the Brontes (Paperback): Helen MacEwan Winifred Gerin - Biographer of the Brontes (Paperback)
Helen MacEwan
R824 Discovery Miles 8 240 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The biographer Winifred Gerin (1901-81), who wrote the lives of all four Bronte siblings, stumbled on her literary vocation on a visit to Haworth, after a difficult decade following the death of her first husband. On the same visit she met her second husband, a Bronte enthusiast twenty years her junior. Together they turned their backs on London to live within sight of the Parsonage, Gerin believing that full understanding of the Brontes required total immersion in their environment. Gerin's childhood and youth, like the Brontes', was characterised by a cultured home and intense imaginative life shared with her sister and two brothers, and by family tragedies (the loss of two siblings in early life). Strong cultural influences formed the children's imagination: polyglot parents, French history, the Crystal Palace, Old Vic productions. Winifred's years at Newnham College, Cambridge were enlivened by eccentric characters such as the legendary lecturer Quiller-Couch (Q'), Lytton Strachey's sister Pernel and Bloomsbury's favourite philosopher, G.E. Moore. Her happy life in Paris with her Belgian cellist husband, Eugene Gerin, was brought to an abrupt end by the Second World War, in which the couple had many adventures: fleeing occupied Belgium, saving Jews in Nice in Vichy France, escaping through Spain and Portugal to England, where they did secret war work for Political Intelligence near Bletchley. After Eugene's death in 1945 Winifred coped with bereavement through poetry and playwriting until discovering her true literary metier on the trip to Haworth. She also wrote about Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Fanny Burney. The book is based on her letters and on her unpublished memoir.

Virginia Woolf (Paperback): Dorothy Brewster Virginia Woolf (Paperback)
Dorothy Brewster
R1,027 Discovery Miles 10 270 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Originally published in 1962, Virginia Woolf, provides a commentary on the literary work of Virginia Woolf - examining not only her the novels, but also the considerable body of criticism surrounding her work. Along with the essential biographical details of Woolf, the books recreates the atmosphere of 'the Bloomsbury Group' and gives us a valuable insight into a very rich period of English literature, involving such figures as Leslie Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, Christopher Isherwood, David Garnett and others. The book provides a comprehensive account of Virginia Woolf's body of work and will be of interest to academics and students alike.

Women of Bloomsbury - Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington (Paperback): Mary Ann Caws Women of Bloomsbury - Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington (Paperback)
Mary Ann Caws
R1,033 Discovery Miles 10 330 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding - or creating - their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.

Ian Fleming and Operation Golden Eye - Keeping Spain out of World War II (Paperback): Mark Simmons Ian Fleming and Operation Golden Eye - Keeping Spain out of World War II (Paperback)
Mark Simmons
R317 Discovery Miles 3 170 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

This book tells the story of the various Allied operations and schemes instigated to keep Spain and Portugal out of WWII, which included the widespread bribery of high ranking Spanish officials and the duplicity of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. Ian Fleming and Alan Hillgarth were the architects of Operation Golden Eye, the sabotage and disruption scheme that would be put in place had Germany invaded Spain. Fleming visited the Iberian Peninsula and Tangiers several times during the war, arguably his greatest achievement in WWII and the closest he came to being a real secret agent. It was these visits which supplied much of the background material for his fiction - Fleming even called his home on Jamaica where he created 007 'Goldeneye'. The book begins with Hitler's dilemma about which way to move, and his meeting with Francisco Franco at Hendaye in October 1940, a major turning point in the war when an alliance between Germany and Spain seemed possible. Simmons explores the British reaction to this, with Operation Tracer being created by Admiral Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence. This was a plan to leave a listening and observation post buried in the Rock of Gibraltar should it have fallen to the Germans. A chapter is also devoted to Portugal - the SIS and SOE operations there and the vital Wolfram wars. Operation Golden Eye was eventually put on standby in 1943 as the risk of the Nazis occupying Spain was much reduced. Simmons consulted Foreign Office, SOE, CIA and OKW files when writing this book.

A Secret Sisterhood - The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (Paperback):... A Secret Sisterhood - The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (Paperback)
Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney 1
R429 R359 Discovery Miles 3 590 Save R70 (16%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, but what about the friendships of women writers? A Secret Sisterhood, drawing on letters and diaries, some never published before, brings to light a wealth of surprising female collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, amateur playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Bronte; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and the ebullient Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always--until now--tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.

On Seamus Heaney (Hardcover): Roy Foster On Seamus Heaney (Hardcover)
Roy Foster
R462 Discovery Miles 4 620 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

Tolstoy - A Russian Life (Paperback, Main): Rosamund Bartlett Tolstoy - A Russian Life (Paperback, Main)
Rosamund Bartlett 1
R469 R336 Discovery Miles 3 360 Save R133 (28%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station attended by the world's media. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history. Born into a privileged aristocratic family, he seemed set to join the ranks of degenerate Russian noblemen, but fighting in the Crimean war alongside rank and file soldiers opened his eyes to Russia's social problems and he threw himself into teaching the peasantry to read and write. After his marriage he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded as two of the greatest novels in world literature. Rosamund Bartlett's exceptional biography of this brilliant, maddening and contrary man draws on key Russian sources, including the many fascinating new materials which have been published about Tolstoy and his legacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A Life in the Day (Paperback): Hunter Davies A Life in the Day (Paperback)
Hunter Davies 1
R281 R191 Discovery Miles 1 910 Save R90 (32%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Hunter Davies' childhood lived amongst the post-war dirt and grime of Carlisle was immediately hailed as a classic memoir from one of Britain's foremost columnists of the past half century. The Co-op's Got Bananas! left our protagonist at the cusp of working for one of the world's greatest newspapers - The Sunday Times. In this much-anticipated sequel, Hunter now looks back across five decades of successful writing to reflect on his colourful memories of the living in London during the height of the Swinging Sixties, becoming editor of Britain's first colour weekend supplement The Sunday Times magazine; befriending the Beatles; and interviewing (and partying with) the biggest names in television, film and theatre of the day. Hunter brings the story full circle to reflect on his years spent with the love of his life - the bestselling writer Margaret Forster, who sadly passed away in February 2016. This will not only be a colourful and enjoyable memoir of what it was like to be at the epicentre of Britain's artistic heart, but also an emotional, heart-felt tribute to family, friends and colleagues. For those captivated by The Co-op's Got Bananas!, this sequel is a must read.

Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic (Paperback): H. Cixous Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic (Paperback)
H. Cixous
R470 Discovery Miles 4 700 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic is a compelling new volume in Helene Cixous's search for lost time. Readers of earlier volumes - Hemlock and Hyperdream, among others - will reconnect with familiar characters: Eve, the elderly mother now in her hundredth year, Helene, the daughter, who never expected to become a mother at 70, and the brother, childhood companion and rival. She has almost no time to write. "You hate me! You hate me!" someone shouts. "You want me dead!" Is that a revolver on the table? Bang! Shot or door slammed? The brother storms out. The Family is destroying itself. Twists and Turns, like all Cixous's books, is a many-faceted text, whose narrative spins its webs in corners familiar to Cixous readers: corners with books and writers - Montaigne, Proust, Kafka, Derrida; a theater and plays; friendship, and love. It is a tale on the scale of Greek myth, about the inescapable entanglements of family relationships, that can lead one, in hyperbolic mode, to envision murder and suicide, for, as Cixous writes, "with love's force one hates." And yet, "everything twists and turns": this is a tale with profoundly touching reversals.

Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces (Paperback): Michael Chabon Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces (Paperback)
Michael Chabon 1
R306 R199 Discovery Miles 1 990 Save R107 (35%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Manhood for Amateurs and Moonglow, returns with a collection of heartfelt, humorous and insightful essays on the meaning of fatherhood. You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you and if you are lucky they even, on occasion, manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough What are you allowed to talk about with your children? When to step in with advice, when to let them make their own mistakes? It's more complicated than you think. Somehow you muddle through. In this heartfelt, humorous and wise book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon attempts to weigh in on difficult conversations with his children, on everything from texting girls to death. But it is when he hangs back that he catches them transforming into their own people. What emerges is a father's deep respect for his children's passions and for their bravery in the face of conformity. Whether you know the joy and struggles of being a father, or were shaped by one, you will find a home in these stunning essays.

Samuel Beckett - The Last Modernist (Paperback): Anthony Cronin Samuel Beckett - The Last Modernist (Paperback)
Anthony Cronin
R431 Discovery Miles 4 310 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature both as a man and a writer. Cronin explores how the sporty schoolboy of solid Protestant bourgeois stock became a prizewinning student at Trinity, flirted with scholarship, and, in Paris, found himself at the center of its literary avant-garde as an intimate friend of James Joyce. But he was a young man who struggled with complexities in his own nature as well as with problems of literary expression. In the small provincial city of Kassel, Germany, the cosmopolitan Beckett experienced a faltering entanglement with his cousin--one of the first in a series of problematic encounters with women. The war years, which he spent as a member of the Resistance and a refugee in the South of France, brought Beckett the self-probings and discoveries that led to the great works. Then, with his sudden and astonishing fame, the balloons of myth began to inflate and a stereotype was born--frozen in exile and enigma, solemnity and sanctity. Anthony Cronin bursts these balloons to see more clearly what lies behind. Without moralizing or psychologizing, without pretensions or piety, he uncovers the real Beckett, the way the life was lived, the way the art was made.

Bright Star, Green Light - The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Hardcover): Jonathan Bate Bright Star, Green Light - The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Hardcover)
Jonathan Bate
R640 R512 Discovery Miles 5 120 Save R128 (20%) Ships in 5 - 10 working days

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 'Highly engaging ... Go now, read this book' THE TIMES 'For awhile after you quit Keats,' Fitzgerald once wrote, 'All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.' John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet's lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence. Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country - Travelling Through the Land of My Ancestors (Paperback): Louise Erdrich Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country - Travelling Through the Land of My Ancestors (Paperback)
Louise Erdrich
R303 R247 Discovery Miles 2 470 Save R56 (18%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky - Master Builders of the Spirit (Paperback): Stefan Zweig Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky - Master Builders of the Spirit (Paperback)
Stefan Zweig
R1,396 Discovery Miles 13 960 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

Written over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of the world.

Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures.

Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences. Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message of this book.

Pocket Maya Angelou Wisdom - Empowering Quotes and Wise Words from a Literary Icon (Hardcover): Hardie Grant Books Pocket Maya Angelou Wisdom - Empowering Quotes and Wise Words from a Literary Icon (Hardcover)
Hardie Grant Books
R190 R152 Discovery Miles 1 520 Save R38 (20%) Ships in 5 - 10 working days

Pocket Maya Angelou Wisdom is a collection of some of her best and most empowering quotes. This is the ultimate keepsake for fans of Maya Angelou's beautiful poetry, as well as for anyone looking for a bit of in-the-moment inspiration to have in their back pocket. Some quotes from Maya Angelou: `If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.' `You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.' `When we unite in purpose, we are greater than the sum of our parts' `Love recognises no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive as its destination full of hope.' `Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.'

Leaving New Jersey (Paperback): Barbara Kamler Leaving New Jersey (Paperback)
Barbara Kamler
R585 R426 Discovery Miles 4 260 Save R159 (27%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days
Keeping on Keeping on (Hardcover, Limited edition): Alan Bennett Keeping on Keeping on (Hardcover, Limited edition)
Alan Bennett
R6,465 Discovery Miles 64 650 Ships in 12 - 17 working days
How I Shed My Skin - Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood (Paperback): Jim Grimsley How I Shed My Skin - Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood (Paperback)
Jim Grimsley
R447 R371 Discovery Miles 3 710 Save R76 (17%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Jersey Breaks - Becoming an American Poet (Hardcover): Robert Pinsky Jersey Breaks - Becoming an American Poet (Hardcover)
Robert Pinsky
R615 Discovery Miles 6 150 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

In late-1940s Long Branch, an historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighbourhood of Italian, Black and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high-school C-student whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write. Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighbourhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. Jersey Breaks offers a candid self-portrait and, underlying Pinsky's notable public presence and unprecedented three terms as poet laureate of the United States, a unique poetic understanding of American culture.

W-3 - A Memoir (Hardcover): Bette Howland W-3 - A Memoir (Hardcover)
Bette Howland; Introduction by Yiyun Li
R448 Discovery Miles 4 480 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'At moments dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cook, Observer 'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow's apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid - and often surprisingly funny - portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer's life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. 'For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin-real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way . . . At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.'

The Importance of Being Poirot (Paperback): Jeremy Black The Importance of Being Poirot (Paperback)
Jeremy Black
R501 Discovery Miles 5 010 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

Written by the renowned British historian who has been described as both utterly thorough and humanely delicate, Jeremy Black offers a guided tour through the mind of Agatha Christie and life during the Great World Wars. His incomparable treatment of literary craft developing alongside global military engagement nearly overshadows the natural draw of the crime drama that is the subject of his book. Indeed, the "prurience and sensationalism" of crime is not as exciting as Black's aptitude for drawing the reality from the fiction (and periphery sources), giving Christie a much louder voice than she might ever have dreamed. If Christie is also moralist and mirror to her times, Black here plays his part as the detective and reveals layers of previously unmined truths in her stories. Hercule Poirot as a character is masterfully imagined, but Black shows us how he is inseparable from Christie's turbulent and changing world. He also illuminates significant social commentary in Christie's fiction, and in so doing Black often uses his authority to vindicate Christie's work from hastily, at times stupidly, applied labels and interpretations. He is especially magnificent in his chapters, "Xenophobia" and "The Sixties." Black nevertheless gives due recognition to Christie's critics when they have something relevant and reasonable to say, and hence the reader finds yet another service in Black's comprehensive review of the reviewers over the expanse of Christie's writing career. For all this, Black proves himself to be a worthy history-teller because he can aptly 'detect' the meaning of stories that seeks to answer the past and guide the present. His erudition runs much deeper than his ability to navigate the stores of resources available on the subject, and the reader gets a glimpse of this early on when in the introduction he proffers his own defense for writing about the importance of a Hercule Poirot. Black writes, "the notion of crime had a moral component from the outset, and notably so in terms of the struggle between Good and Evil, and in the detection of the latter. Indeed, it is this detection that is the basis of the most powerful strand of detection story, because Evil disguises its purposes. It has to do so in a world and humanity made fundamentally benign and moral by God." The Golden Age of detective novels represents much more than a triumph of a literary genre. It is in its own right a story of how the challenge to address the problem of evil was accepted. Its convergence with the plot-rich narrative of the twentieth century in the modern age renders Black's account a thrilling masterpiece, seducing historians to read fiction and crime junkies to read more history.

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