On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer. As well as setting the novelista (TM)s work in the context of Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite, energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and the mundane.

Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of Kafka, Chekov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with Rotha (TM)s comic brashness and bravura.

Terrorism: The Basics is an ideal starting point for anyone interested in one of the most discussed, written about and analysed aspects of modern life. Common misconceptions are dispelled as the authors provide clear and jargon-free answers to the big questions:

These questions and more are answered with reference to contemporary groups and situations allowing readers to relate theory to what they have seen on the news. Written with clarity and insight, this book is the perfect first book on terrorism for students of all levels.

This is a reissue of a critical introduction to the novels of Virginia Woolf, first published in 1977. It makes close, illuminating readings of her nine novels, placing Woolf in her literary context and providing an accessible, clear and valuable guide for students starting out on a study of Woolf as a novelist, and for general readers seeking a fresh, helpful entry-point to the challenge of reading Woolf. Twenty years later, Hermione Lee wrote a prize-winning and acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf: this critical study represented an early stage in this biographer-critic 's life-long interest and involvement with Woolf 's life and work.

On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer. As well as setting the novelist's work in the context of Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite, energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and the mundane.

Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of Kafka, Checkov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with Roth's comic brashness and bravura.

Notable writers-including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow-celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home-from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London. With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home. Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house Susan Walker on Morocco's ancient Roman House of Venus Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writers' houses Margaret MacMillan on her mother's Toronto house a poem by Maura Dooley, "Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts"-the house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson David Cannadine on Winston Churchill's dream house, Chartwell Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo's Villa Emily Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson's houses a poem by Simon Armitage, "The Manor" Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark Alexander Masters on the fear of houses Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue, "Safe Houses" Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden's Austrian home Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses Julian Barnes on Jean Sibelius and Ainola

Notable writers-including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow-celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home-from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London. With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home. Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house Susan Walker on Morocco's ancient Roman House of Venus Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writers' houses Margaret MacMillan on her mother's Toronto house a poem by Maura Dooley, "Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts"-the house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson David Cannadine on Winston Churchill's dream house, Chartwell Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo's Villa Emily Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson's houses a poem by Simon Armitage, "The Manor" Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark Alexander Masters on the fear of houses Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue, "Safe Houses" Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden's Austrian home Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses Julian Barnes on Jean Sibelius and Ainola

Shot through with Stoppard's voice, and illuminating all his plays, Lee's gripping narrative draws on unprecedented access to archive material, interviews and long conversations with Stoppard himself. She traces the dramatic story of his family's flight from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, his sudden leap to fame, his personal life and his dazzling successes. A riveting account of a very public and very private man.

This book, first published in 1977, is not about Bloomsbury, lesbianism, madness or suicide, but is a much-needed introduction to Virginia Woolfa (TM)s nine novels, written in the hope of turning attention back from the life to the fictional work. Its clarity and insights will make this book invaluable to a student embarking on a study of Virginia Woolf as a novelist, and to all those whose interest has been aroused by the continuing publication of biographical material. It will, moreover, increase the enjoyment, not only of enthusiasts, but also of those who have hitherto, found her a a ~difficulta (TM) writer.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer - full of wit, feeling and illumination. Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's reviews, essays and autobiographical writings. This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doyle; on classic writers Muriel Spark, A.E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M.R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E.H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris: on writers in their old age; and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one. This is a fantastically funny book - as much of an entertainment as the Kingsley Amis letters.

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a savage indictment of Virginia Woolf's society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where `freedom and justice' might really be possible. This is Virginia Woolf's longest novel, and the one she found the most difficult to write. The most popular of all her writings during her lifetime, it can now be re-read as the most challengingly political, even revolutionary, of all her books. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Terrorism: The Basics is an ideal starting point for anyone interested in one of the most discussed, written about and analysed aspects of modern life. Common misconceptions are dispelled as the authors provide clear and jargon-free answers to the big questions:

These questions and more are answered with reference to contemporary groups and situations allowing readers to relate theory to what they have seen on the news. Written with clarity and insight, this book is the perfect first book on terrorism for students of all levels.

In this collection of remarkable biographical portraits, the great essayist and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin brings to life a wide range of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, politicians, and writers. These include Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova. With the exception of Roosevelt, Berlin met them all, and he knew many of them well. Other figures recalled here include the Zionist Yitzhak Sadeh, the U.S. Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, the classicist and wit Maurice Bowra, the philosopher J. L. Austin, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson. For this edition, ten new pieces have been added, including portraits of David Ben-Gurion, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, and Stephen Spender, as well as Berlin's autobiographical reflections on Jewish Oxford and his Oxford undergraduate years. Rich and enlightening, "Personal Impressions" is a vibrant demonstration of Berlin's belief that ideas truly live only through people.

'The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening' To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

A unique portrait of a great playwright by one of our leadin literary biographers. With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee builds a metiucously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he's ever lived in, every piece of writing he's ever done, and every play and film he's ever worked on; but in the end this is the story of a complex, elusive and private man, which tells you an enormous amount about him but leaves you, also, with the fascinating mystery of his ultimate unknowability.

A must-have new edition of Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, featuring a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, The New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.

'The London Scene' is a collection of essays written by one of London's most acclaimed writers. Virginia Woolf was born and lived much of her life in the city, using it as the backdrop for many of her works.

This comprehensive and welcoming edition draws on the whole of Stevie Smith's output in poetry, prose and drawings from Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) to Scorpion and Other Poems (1972). Hermione Lee's introduction and arrangement bring out the connections between Stevie Smith's different writings, and show us what an extraordinary and original writer she was. The selection is complemented by biographical and textual notes, and forms an attractive introduction to the work of an idiosyncratic English genius.

Intimate, perceptive, critically acute, funny and moving, this is the first full biography of one of the finest English novelists of the last century.
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel "Offshore" in 1979, and her last work, "The Blue Flower," was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences -- a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis.
Fitzgerald's life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop's Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism.
Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady, but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant account -- by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired -- pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest.

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, give the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.

Virginia Woolf saw the novel as an elegy to her own parents, and in her diary she wrote, 'I used to think of him [father] and mother daily, but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind.'

'One of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time' Margaret Drabble To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before. Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Hermione Lee

What choices must a biographer make when stitching the pieces of a life into one coherent whole? How do we best create an accurate likeness of a private life from the few articles that linger after death? How do we choose what gets left out? This intriguing and witty collection of essays by an internationally acclaimed biographer looks at how biography deals with myths and legends, what goes missing and what can't be proved in the story of a life. "Virginia Woolf's Nose" presents a variety of case-studies, in which literary biographers are faced with gaps and absences, unprovable stories and ambiguities surrounding their subjects. By looking at stories about Percy Bysshe Shelley's shriveled, burnt heart found pressed between the pages of a book, Jane Austen's fainting spell, Samuel Pepys's lobsters, and the varied versions of Virginia Woolf's life and death, preeminent biographer Hermione Lee considers how biographers deal with and often utilize these missing body parts, myths, and contested data to "fill in the gaps" of a life story.

In "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters," an essay dealing with missing parts and biographical legends, Hermione Lee discusses one of the most complicated and emotionally charged examples of the contested use of biographical sources. "Jane Austen Faints" takes five competing versions of the same dramatic moment in the writer's life to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women. "Virginia Woolf's Nose" looks at the way this legendary author's life has been translated through successive transformations, from biography to fiction to film, and suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life. Finally, "How to End It All" analyzes the changing treatment of deathbed scenes in biography to show how biographical conventions have shifted, and asks why the narrators and readers of life-stories feel the need to give special meaning and emphasis to endings.

Virginia Woolf's Nose sheds new light on the way biographers bring their subjects to life as physical beings, and offers captivating new insights into the drama of "life-writing."

"Virginia Woolf's Nose" is a witty, eloquent, and funny text by a renowned biographer whose sensitivity to the art of telling a story about a human life is unparalleled--and in creating it, Lee articulates and redefines the parameters of her craft.

"By turns lyrical, self-mocking, and outlandish, Woolf's meditation on the perils and privileges of the sickbed lampoons the loneliness that makes one 'glad of a kick from a housemaid.' When Woolf imagines beauty in a frozen-over garden . . . it seems less a triumph of nature than of art."--"The New Yorker"

"Brilliant and beautiful."--Francine Prose, "Bookforum"

" A] long-neglected reverie on illness . . . reprinted by the sterling Paris Press. This is a brilliant and odd book, charged with restrained emotion and sudden humor."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review"

"The resurrection of this forgotten work on illness is a boon indeed. . . . This is Woolf at her spangled best."--"Booklist"

In this poignant and humorous book, Virginia Woolf observes that no human being is spared toothaches, colds, and the flu. Yet illness--transformative and as common as love and war--is rarely the subject of polite conversation, let alone literature. This paperback facsimile of the 1930 Hogarth Press edition, with Hermione Lee's introduction to Woolf's life, work, and "On Being Ill," is ideal for book groups, general readers, students, caregivers, and of course anyone suffering from a cold or more serious illness.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is among the greatest literary geniuses of the twentieth century. Her groundbreaking books include "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," and "A Room of One's Own."

Hermione Lee is the renowned author of "Virginia Woolf." Her other best-selling biographies include "Edith Wharton," "Willa Cather," and "Philip Roth." She is president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, England.

This volume combines for the first time in paperback two books by Virginia Woolf which are among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack on Patriarchy and sexual inequality. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN, first published in 1929, is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women writers. The sequal was published in 1938 as THREE GUINEAS - a passionate and much more strongly charged polemic which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.

James Fitzjames Stephen was a distinguished jurist, a codifier of the law in England and India, and the judge in the ill-fated Maybrick case; a serious and prolific journalist, a pillar of the Saturday Review and the Pall Mall Gazette; and in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) the hard-hitting assailant of John Stuart Mill. Fitzjames's younger brother Leslie was founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and father of Virginia Woolf. The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, by his brother Leslie Stephen (1895) is the biography of one eminent Victorian by another. It is a lucid and affectionate portrait, yet far from uncritical, as revealing of its author as its subject. With a narrative that embraces legal history, the government of India, the Victorian press, the crisis of religious faith, and the 'paradise lost' of political liberalism, the biography is also an indispensable source for the history of the Stephen family, which belonged to what Noel Annan called the 'intellectual aristocracy' of the nineteenth century, connecting the Clapham Sect to the Bloomsbury group. This first modern edition of The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen is a volume in the OUP series Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen. It includes an introductory essay by Hermione Lee, extensive notes, four appendices of additional documents (many previously unpublished), and a bibliography of Fitzjames Stephen's articles and reviews by Thomas E. Schneider.