Last 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 intimacy delivers frankness that formal biography, however plumped with proper sources, seldom achieves. To John Schlesinger, '“Fuck 'em all dear,” you used to say. And God knows, you did your best.'; Ludwig Wittgenstein saying 'What do you know about philosophy, Russell, what have you ever known?'; Cyril Connolly to William Somerset Maugham who was complaining about his lack of true lovers, '...then although the room was chilly, no one cared to poke poor Willie'; 'You bloody fool,' the first words said by a venerable professor to George Steiner. As the parade goes by, Last Post becomes what classicists call a 'prosopography'. Raphael's own versatility shows up in the varieties of tone and vocabulary in long letters of tribute to the two Stanleys Kubrick and Donen, Ken Tynan, Leslie Bricusse, Tom Maschler, Dorothy Nimmo the known and the less known but no less valued; finally, above all, in farewell to his beloved daughter Sarah.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Like his Austrian contemporary Sigmund Freud, the doctor and writer Arthur Schnitzler was a bold pioneer in exploring the dark tangled roots of human consciousness. His novella Dream Story tells the tale of a young married man who, after a discussion with his wife about their fantasises, experiences an eery reverie through Vienna's underbelly.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price At 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.

Arthur Schnitzler is probably most famous for La Ronde, a play too scandalous to publish or perform in his own lifetime but whose daisy-chain of couplings inspired both Max Ophuls's classic film and David Hare's modernized version, The Blue Room, which played to sell-out audiences in the West End and on Broadway. Dream Story is an equally erotic work, in which a married couple are first traumatized and then achieve a new depth of understanding by confessing to each other their sexual fantasies, dream-like adventures and might-have-beens ... Taking us on a guided tour of Vienna's seedy cafés, red-light district, decadent villas, hospitals and morgue, Schnitzler brilliantly uncovers the violence and depravity lurking beneath the surface of civilized society. Dream Story is the inspiration for the film Eyes Wide Shut, co-written by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael.

Sarah Raphael (1960-2001) died young: preparing a show for New York, she contracted pneumonia and never recovered. Her work, large- and small-scale, is now represented in all the leading British collections. A major retrospective at Marlborough Fine Arts, London, in 2003, bringing together work from her last seven years, was as amazing as her earlier exhibitions in its brilliance, its formal variety and inventiveness. One breathtaking area of her work which has so far been inadequately displayed is her drawing. There are few modern artists who equal her in assurance and firmness of line. Michael Ayrton said to her when she was fourteen, 'Draw your own hands. If you can draw your own hands you can do anything.' She did, and she could. Her informal portraits of friends, some well-known, some unknown, never flatter except in telling the truth. She did justice to every model, and her sense of setting, the economy of her perspectives, her ability to create presence, continue to amaze the viewer. Even the most seemingly casual sketch, closely observed, reconstitutes an original, sculptural space about it. The lessons Michael Ayrton taught ensured that she is always at least a three-dimensional artist. Most of the drawings are from her notebooks and sketchbooks, and Frederic Raphael draws from over twenty-five years of work, primarily pencil sketches. As William Boyd has written, 'you can tell how good they are, yourself'. She has her own, unarguable authority.

Anouilh's classic historical tale of conflict between church and state, in a major new translation by Frederic and Stephen Raphael In Becket, Anouilh presents the history of England under Henry II as if it was France under German occupation. As Henry's long-time political playmate, Thomas's elevation to Archbishop of Canterbury forces him to sacrifice the love of his leader for his newfound love of the church: If I become archbishop I shall cease to be your friend. Becket was first produced at the Theatre Montparnasse in 1959.Witty, intelligent, full of repartee and irreverence...it can hold an audience spellbound (Financial Times) This new translation is published to tie in with a production of the play opening at London's Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

The Great Philosophers in one volume: the widely acclaimed series on the greatest philosophers by specialists writing for the general reader. The Great Philosophers brings together in one volume and in chronological order the best from our hugely successful series: Anthony Gottlieb on Socrates; Bernard Williams on Plato; John Cottingham on Descartes; Roger Scruton on Spinoza; David Berman on Berkeley; Anthony Quinton on Hume; Terry Eagleton on Marx; Ray Monk on Russell; Jonathan Ree on Heidegger; Peter Hacker on Wittgenstein; Frederic Raphael on Popper Andrew Hodges on Turing.

A sharp, often surprising, view of the classical world by a major classics scholar at Cambridge and author of The Glittering Prizes This book is the culmination of more than sixty years of a writing life during which Frederic Raphael has returned again and again to the literature and landscape of the ancient world. In his new book, Raphael deploys his renowned wit and erudition to give us a vivid mosaic of the complexities and contradictions underlying Western civilization and its continuing influence upon contemporary society. Tackling a broad range of topics, from the presumed superiority of democracy to the momentum behind today's gay rights movement, Raphael's often daringly heterodox view of the Greek and Roman world will provoke, surprise, and, at the same time, entertain readers. He shows how the interplay of fiction and reality, rhetorical aspiration and practical cunning, are threaded through modern culture.

First published in 1965, this is a tale of the face that has launched a thousand billboards. Diana Scott is "The Happiness Girl" in ads plastered all over the country, and she's hunting happiness in more ways than she's care to confess. She's the darling of the rich and powerful: of Prince Cesare della Romita...of TV writer and interviewer Robert Gold...of suave business success Miles Brand. She's the life of the Dolce Vita, Paris version - a reckless seeker of self, caught up in a frenzied sexcursion of jet-set Europe. This is her story - a novel based on the bold and powerful Joseph E. Levine motion picture.

Marion and Barnaby Pierce are an American couple who are about to sell the New England house in which they have raised what seems to be a happy family. They are leaving on a trip across America in a vintage jaguar which Barnaby intends to give his son who is getting married in Los Angeles. Their long drive from coast to coast is planned to include a number of stops: the first to deposit their dog with Marion's pious, bitter sister in upstate New York. At every stop there are memories and surprises as Barnaby and Marion live and re-live their secret dramas and, in the allusive, edgy dialogues of a long-married couple, reveal more about themselves than they care to confess. In Minneapolis, they find that their daughter, Stacey, is pregnant by one man and living with another; in Chicago, Barnaby's old writing partner, now a millionaire businessman, is unwisely lured into an old vaudeville routine; in Seattle, a meeting with a newspaper editor who once loved Marion re-opens old wounds; and in Los Angeles, their other daughter, Zara, who now calls herself Zenobia, turns out to be a shockingly unsociable member of her brother's wedding.

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 Hyde, about whom he once made a film, a film which is showing on TV as he enters his suite? Who is the beautiful girl whom he sees in the lobby, and is she the same girl who is later found dead under sinister circumstances? Is Victor England a victim or a killer? There have been many novels about Hollywood. There has never been one like this. Frederic Raphael's vision of California Time is of a 'sequence of presents', and his innovations in the form of the novel serve only to add to the multi-faceted strangeness of the 'celluloid capital'. Victor England, young and old at the same time, is a man of many wives and many films, rich and yet dependent on the bounty of a failing industry, whose golden slave he is.

A single-volume edition of the major Greek tragedies

In a period of sixty-six years, three Athenian playwrights produced a series of tragedies which became a touchstone for drama for the next two and a half thousand years. The six plays in this volume include Aeschylus' Persians (472 BC), the earliest surviving Greek tragedy and only surviving 'history' play; his Prometheus Bound, perhaps the most deeply mythological of all tragedies, presenting an archetype of the human condition; Sophocles' Women of Trachis, a deeply poignant piece, portraying Heracles' death through his wife's mistake; his strange Philoctetes, which presents a fascinating moral debate and a young man's realisation of the importance of loyalty to his own ideals; Euripides' Trojan Women, the greatest anti-war play ever written; and his intangible Bacchae, a play full of paradoxes which functions at many different levels.

The volume is edited and introduced by Marianne McDonald, Professor of Theatre and Classics, University of California, San Diego, and J. Michael Walton, Professor of Drama at the University of Hull.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. "A boon for classicists and general readers alike. For the reader who comes to tragedy for the first time, these translations are eminently 'accessible.'. . . For the classicist, these versions constitute an ambitious reinterpretation of traditional masterpieces."--"Boston Book Review" "A speakable version of Sophocles's 'Philoctetes': as it were, after 25 years, a sequel to Pound's 'The Women of Trachis'." --Hugh Kenner, "New York Times Book Review" "A two-year project to publish the corpus of classical Greek drama in translations by an impressive array of contemporary poets. It may not be long before anyone who mentions that he is reading Sophocles in Greek can expect to be told, 'Oh, but you simply "must' read it in translation.'"--"New Yorker" "Don't look for the wild and woolly--these were put together by wordsmiths. . . . But they are a far cry from some of the stodgier translations."--"Washington Post" "The 12-volume set will offer readers new verse translations of the complete surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as the surviving comedies of Aristophanes and Menander. The complete line of Greek theater classics has not been offered to readers since 1938."--"Publishers Weekly"

Published in the new Methuen Classical Dramatists series

A dramatist whose trademark was the unexpected, Euripides has constantly challenged and intrigued audiences, from Athens of the fifth century BC to the present. The three plays in this volume demonstrate Euripides' versatility. Hippolytos (which was turned into Phedre by Racine), deals with sexual passion, incest and abstinence; Suppliants (a version of the Antigone story) sets the play in Eleusis and dramatises the moment when the mothers of the dead sons of Oedipus beg Theseus to go to Thebes and demand their sons' bodies for burial. In Rhesos, all the confusion of sentry duty, the intrigue of spies and intruders, disguises and deceptions are crammed into a single night when the fortunes of war turn against the Trojans by a mixture of devious behaviour and sheer bad luck.

Four of Aeschylus' greatest plays reissued in the new Classical Greek Dramatists series

Includes the Oresteia trilogy, a key sequence of plays within the Western dramatic tradition - widely studied in schools and universities. Agamemnon tells the tale of the king's return from the battle of Troyto find that his wife has laid out a red carpet to welcome him that will, ironically, lead him to his death; The Libation Bearers continues the saga into the next generation with Orestes and Electra seeking justice for their dead father whilst in the Eumenides, the traces of inherited bloodlust are laid to rest by the figure of Athene. Translated with an introduction and notes from J. Michael Walton - the series editor for the Greek classics and reissued in the new Methuen Classical Greek Dramatists series in stylish, new and modern jackets.

Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary critic, exchanged e-mails sporadically over the years, usually commenting on each other's various writings. Then one day in 2009, Raphael wrote to Epstein to suggest that, since they enjoyed a benevolence toward each other unusual among literary men, they begin an exchange of e-mail correspondence on a regular basis. His thought was that, at the end of a year or so, the result might be an interesting book. Epstein, who had long admired Raphael's writing, agreed. The two men had never met, nor had they even spoken over the phone. Their friendship was conducted entirely online. Each week they exchanged e-mails of roughly 2,000 words. They discovered a great many things about each other they hadn't previously known. They shared, for example, a common birthplace in Chicago, where Raphael was born, though his family moved to England in 1938, and his education after that was exclusively English. Each man belongs to that dolorous fraternity of those who have buried a child. Their literary tastes vary, though not widely, since both grew up admiring the great modernist writers and both had an enduring love for Greek and Roman culture. Both men share a fundamental agreement about what, in artistic and intellectual realms, is serious. Raphael and Epstein are artists who happen also to be intellectuals. The result is that few subjects are off limits to them. They are of an age when they have long ceased to worry about their reputations. Wherever else they may look, it is not over their shoulders. Candor reinforced by comedy is the reigning note of Where Were We? as it was of Distant Intimacy, their earlier volume of e-mail correspondence. Writing about other writers, actors, politics, the movies, intellectual fashions, the writing life, and much else, both men say precisely what they think, and say it in high style. Readers may or may not agree with their strong views, but they will never find their thoughts other than fascinating.

From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37-c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world.
Joseph ben Mattathias's transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal of Diasporan Jews seeking a place in the dominant cultures they inhabit. Raphael brings a scholar's rigor, a historian's perspective, and a novelist's imagination to this project. He goes beyond the fascinating details of Josephus's life and his singular literary achievements to examine how Josephus has been viewed by posterity, finding in him the prototype for the un-Jewish Jew, the assimilated intellectual, and the abiding apostate: the recurrent figures in the long centuries of the Diaspora. Raphael's insightful portraits of  Y ehuda Halevi, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Kraus, Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hannah Arendt extend and illuminate the Josephean worldview Raphael so eloquently lays out.