The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire

Baker, Deborah

Sports & Outdoors

Vintage

Here is the first major biography of one of the most provocative, prolific, and influential figures in British-American literary history. In her poetry, fiction, essays, and public statements, Laura Riding, the author of twenty-three books, tackled feminism, communism, sexuality, Freud, language and belief, and the coming-of-age of the American dream. In her personal relationships she was often at the center of a circle of friends and artists whose activities she inspired and sometimes controlled. Her extraordinary range of associates included writers as diverse as Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. During a long and "scandalous" affair with Robert Graves, she watched over his most productive period and guided much of his best work. Together they launched the New Criticism.

In extremis : the life of Laura Riding

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Hamish Hamilton

In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding

iUniverse

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

Penguin Press HC, The

Chatto&Windus

*A 2011 National Book Award Finalist*
A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism from Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer Deborah Baker
What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam's argument with the West. 
A cache of Maryam's letters to her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends the acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of twentieth-century Islam. Casting a shadow over these letters is the mysterious figure of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, both Maryam's adoptive father and the man who laid the intellectual foundations for militant Islam. 
As she assembles the pieces of a singularly perplexing life, Baker finds herself captive to questions raised by Maryam's journey. Is her story just another bleak chapter in a so-called clash of civilizations? Or does it signify something else entirely? And then there's this: Is the life depicted in Maryam's letters home and in her books an honest reflection of the one she lived? Like many compelling and true tales, The Convert is stranger than fiction. It is a gripping account of a life lived on the radical edge and a profound meditation on the cultural conflicts that frustrate mutual understanding.

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism

Community & Culture

Graywolf Press

*A 2011 National Book Award Finalist*
A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism from Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer Deborah Baker
What drives a woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of permanent exile in Pakistan? The Convert, a finalist for the National Book Award and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2011, tells the gripping story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore.

A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India
John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers―W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender―achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man’s wartime loyalties would lie.
Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.
Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.

The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire

A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s follows the journey of Allen Ginsberg and his companions through the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills, to the Delhi opium dens, to the pyres of Benares, where they witnessed regional spirituality and unrest while searching for the elusive Hope Savage. 25,000 first printing.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baker, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Baker, Deborah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baker, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire

In extremis : the life of Laura Riding

In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism

The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire

The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India