Compiled with the help of access to his private papers, this is a biography of Patrick Hamilton, who was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. Born in Sussex in 1904, the son of a clergyman, he published his first novel, "Craven House", in 1925, and within a few years had established a wide readership. Two plays - "Rope" (on which Hitchcock based his film) and "Gaslight" - brought him great commercial success, and his high point as a novelist was reached with "The Slaves of Solitude" and "Hangover Square". Hamilton was plagued by contradictions. Despite his genteel background, he became an expert chronicler of the English boarding-house, the twilight world of backstreet pubs and the quiet desperation of everyday life. An ideological Marxist, he reverted in later years to blimpish Toryism. Excessively and morbidly sensitive, he sought - with sometimes menacing zeal - his "ideal woman", and would then indulge with equal intensity in his taste for bondage with prostitutes. And, in keeping with one of his work's recurring themes, he drank himself to death.

Through a Glass Darkly Patrick Hamilton

Biographies & Memoirs

Nigel Jones

Arts & Literature

Abacus Uk

<p>This is a biography of Patrick Hamilton, the author of "Rope", "Gas Light" and "Hangover Square", who was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. Born in Sussex in 1904, he moved shortly afterwards with his parents to Hove, where he passed his formative years. His first novel, "Craven House", was published in 1925 and within a few years he had established a wide readership for himself. Two plays, "Rope" (on which Hitchcock based his film) and "Gas Light", brought him commercial success and his high point as a novelist was reached with "The Slaves of Solitude" and "Hangover Square". His reputation seemed assured, but it was overshadowed by personal setbacks and an increasing preoccupation with drink. Yet in spite of these pressures he was able to produce some of his best work, in which an underlying sense of loss and isolation is felt beneath his comic creations. He died in 1962.</p>

Through a glass darkly: The life of Patrick Hamilton

SCRIBNERS

"Rupert Brooke, isn't it a romantic name?" wrote Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf, after first meeting the man who became the "star" of an exceptionally brilliant generation. But behind the facade of the stunning looks and the golden-boy image a very different Brooke was concealed that was far from romantic - and is now revealed in this utterly candid biography. After cutting a swathe through his contemporaries at Rugby and Cambridge, Brooke became the central figure in two distinct coteries - the homosexual Cambridge secret society "the Apostles" and the "Neo-Pagans", a group of free-thinking young people sworn to a carefree outdoor life of gypsy camps, nude swimming and the great outdoors. This compartmentalism was typical of Brooke - addicted to secrecy, he was loved by both men and women, and was himself highly sexually ambivalent. His boyish charm bowled over (almost) all those who met him - including the contemporary great and good like Asquith, Churchill, H.G. Wells and Henry James. But the surface self-confidence and the effortless literary and social success hid a darker Brooke - revealed in this book. At the height of his promise, a seemingly trivial setback in love propelled Brooke into a complete mental and physical collapse, which stripped him of his defences and brought his inner complexes seething to the surface.

Rupert Brooke : Life, Death and Myth

BBC Books

This biography makes full use of much of Patrick Hamilton's own letters and notes, and is sharply insightful in its picture of this contradictory writer.

Through a Glass Darkly

Black Spring Press

Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Assasinate Hitler

Frontline Books

<p>There is no book in English about the wartime Berlin 'salon' run by Kitty Schmidt under the secret control of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution\nSalon Kitty was the most notorious brothel in the decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic - the city of Cabaret . But after the Nazis took power, it became something more a spying centre with every room wired for sound, staffed by women agents specially selected by the SS to coax secrets from their VIP clients. Masterminded by Reinhard Heydrich, the spymaster whom Hitler himself called 'the man with the iron heart', the exclusive establishment turned listening post was patronised by the Nazi leaders themselves, not knowing that hidden ears were listening.\nOne of the last untold stories of the Second World War, Salon Kitty's sensational true history is now revealed by historians Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Dr Julia Schrammel. After years of painstaking research and investigation, the story they tell sheds new light on Nazi methods of control and coercion, and the way that they used and abused sex for their own perverse purposes.</p>

Kitty's Salon

History

John Blake Publishing Ltd

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