Fatima''s Scarf is Caute''s tenth novel. It pr ovides an insight into a Muslim community whose deep faith i s so inconvenient on alien shores. Caute is the winner of th e John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for fiction and a former Fellow o f All Souls College. '

From his earliest years, Gamal Rahman was a troublemaker. Born in Cairo, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Gamal began life by killing his mother in childbirth. As a journalist and tutor to the amorous daughters of President Sharaf, he found his vocation; the literary murder of presidents and princesses. Hostile to Islamic fundamentalism, Gamal finally extended his hitman's contract to God the ultimate literary commission.

By the time The Devil: An Interview is published, Gamal is living in exile in England. Publicly damned and burned by incensed Muslims in the Yorkshire city of Bruddersford, his book generates communal upheaval. Racial tensions erupt. The local Labour Party becomes fiercely embroiled and long-standing alliances are shattered.

Nasreen Hassani, trapped between old values and the modern quest for personal fulfillment, can no longer sustain her marriage. Children rebel against patriarchy, and Muslim girls, inspired by the fourteen-year-old Fatima, embark on a bitter strike to defend their right to wear the scarf of modesty in school. While the claims of women fuel the flames, young men embrace the Sons of Allah, dedicated to the execution of the apostate author Gamal Rahman.

What should a writer owe to himself, and what to society? David Caute's new novel is a masterly penetration of the murderous conflict between Islam and Western values -- a novel of major importance for the modern world.

David Cautes wide-ranging study examines how outstanding novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War. Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War, Caute then explores the god that failed pessimism that overtook the Western political novel in the 1940s. The writers under scrutiny include Hemingway, Dos Passos, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, Serge, Greene, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Strikingly different approaches to the burning issues of the time are found among orthodox Soviet novelists such as Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Kochetov, and Pavlenko. Soviet official culture continued to choke on modernism, formalism, satire, and allegory. In Russia and Eastern Europe dissident novelists offered contesting voices as they engaged in the fraught re-telling of life under Stalinism. The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s generated a new wave of fiction challenging Americas global stance. Mailer, Doctorow, and Coover brought fresh literary sensibilities to bear on such iconic events as the 1967 siege of the Pentagon and the execution of the Rosenbergs.

David Caute's wide-ranging study examines how outstanding novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War.

Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War, Caute then explores the "god that failed" pessimism that overtook the Western political novel in the 1940s. The writers under scrutiny include Hemingway, Dos Passos, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, Serge, Greene, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Strikingly diff erent approaches to the burning issues of the time are found among orthodox Soviet novelists such as Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Kochetov, and Pavlenko. Soviet official culture continued to choke on modernism, formalism, satire, and allegory.

In Russia and Eastern Europe dissident novelists offered contesting voices as they engaged in the fraught re-telling of life under Stalinism. Studies of Pasternak, Grossman, Chukovskaya, Wolf, Johnson, Kundera, and Vladimov lead on to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a uniquely gifted critic of the Soviet system. A sequence of thematic commentaries compare Western and Soviet fictional responses to the Moscow trials, terror, forced labor, and the nature of totalitarianism. The figures of Stalin and Lenin are shown to have fascinated novelists.

The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s generated a new wave of fiction challenging America's global stance. Mailer, Doctorow, and Coover brought fresh literary sensibilities to bear on such iconic events as the 1967 siege of the Pentagon and the execution of the Rosenbergs.

DOUBLES brings to light a buried historical event involving Pablo Picasso and Charles Chaplin. In turmoil as Stalin's death approaches, the Kremlin seeks a propaganda victory. The invitation to Picasso and Chaplin to visit Moscow is seductive. The suppressed work of the great artist and the world-renowned film-maker will be presented to the Soviet public for the first time. Two honey-traps tip the scales. For Picasso a beautiful Russian museum curator, Ola Lepinskaya. For Chaplin a gifted mimic and 'double',Mosfilm's Nina Bolsharova. David Caute calls the past into question in this fascinating exploration of how history is written Hilary Mantel has written of Caute's previous novel: 'I think this book is brilliant. FATIMA'S SCARF is something very rare in English letters: a dazzling political novel. It is funny and immediate, involving and surprising...' David Caute's recent historical works include ISAAC AND ISAIAH (Yale) and THE DANCER DEFECTS (Oxford).

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in post-war thought and literature. In What is Literature? Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to address the phenomenon of literature, exploring why we read, and why we write.

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafés and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.

The Age of Reason is the first volume in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy

In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is known chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who endanger national security-from Nazi fifth columnists to Soviet spies and today's domestic extremists. Yet, working from official documents released to the National Archives,distinguished historian Caute discovers that suspicion also fell on those who merely exercised their civil liberties, posing no threat to national security. In reality, this 'other history' of the Security Service, was dictated not only by the consistent anti-Communist and Imperial aims of the British state but also by the political prejudices of MI5's personnel. The guiding notions were 'Defence of the Realm' and 'subversion.' Caute here exposes the massive state operation to track the activities and affiliations of a range of journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers actors and musicians, who the Security Service classified as a threat to national security. Guilt by association was paramount. Letters were opened, phones were intercepted, private homes were bugged and citizens were placed under physical surveillance by Special Branch agents. Among the targets of surveillance are found such prominent figures as Arthur Ransome, Paul Robeson, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Kingsley Martin, Michael Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, Joseph Losey, Michael Foot and Harriet Harman. More than 200 victims are listed here but further MI5 files will be released to the National Archives.

'A profound, subtle and terrifying piece of writing' The Times Literary Supplement

June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought and felt and did as France fell. Men who shrugged, men who ran, men who fought and tragic men like Mathieu, who had dedicated his life to finding personal freedom, now overwhelmed by remorse and bitterness, who must learn to kill. Iron in the Soul, the third volume of Sartre's Roads to Freedom Trilogy, is a harrowing depiction of war and what it means to lose.

September 1938: in a heatwave Europe tensely awaits the outcome of the Munich conference. In Paris people are waiting too, among them Mathieu, Jacques and Philippe – not one of them ready to fight. Cutting from one scene to the next, Sartre depicts the hopes, fears, and self-deception of Munich, building a powerful montage of that critical week when Europe, in its pathetic longing for a reprieve, blinkered itself against the threat of war.

Two high-voltage scholars engage in a bitter conflict in this irresistible tale of principle and politics in the Cold War years Rancorous and highly public disagreements between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher escalated to the point of cruel betrayal in the mid-1960s, yet surprisingly the details of the episode have escaped historians' scrutiny. In this gripping account of the ideological clash between two of the most influential scholars of Cold War politics, David Caute uncovers a hidden story of passionate beliefs, unresolved antagonism, and the high cost of reprisal to both victim and perpetrator. Though Deutscher (1907-1967) and Berlin (1909-1997) had much in common-each arrived in England in flight from totalitarian violence, quickly mastered English, and found entry into the Anglo-American intellectual world of the 1950s-Berlin became one of the presiding voices of Anglo-American liberalism, while Deutscher remained faithful to his Leninist heritage, resolutely defending Soviet conduct despite his rejection of Stalin's tyranny. Caute combines vivid biographical detail with an acute analysis of the issues that divided these two icons of Cold War politics, and brings to light for the first time the full severity of Berlin's action against Deutscher.

This highly regarded book gives a lucid and balanced account of fellow travellers in Europe and America: those individuals who were not willing to become Communists but were attracted by the socialist systems of the Soviet Union, the Popular Democracies, and Communist China. This revised edition contains new chapters on the effects of the development of the Communist regimes in China, Cuba, and North Vietnam.