Like the Roman

Biographies & Memoirs

Heffer, Simon

Leaders & Notable People

Faber Finds

When a secret agent disappears in highly suspicious circumstances connected with an acid bath, it is not long before two high-powered operatives arrive. But they find the Flaxborough citizenry even more unscrutable than the problems of international spying.

Hopjoy Was Here (A Flaxborough Mystery)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

COLIN WATSON

Mystery

Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World

The sub-title is important: "The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World". The small town is Bransk, in eastern Poland. Before World War II, Bransk was a shtetl whose population was equally divided between Poles and Jews. Today there are no Jews. In "Shtetl", Eva Hoffman reconstructs the lost world of East European Jewry. She explores the rich culture and institutions of Polish Jews, and looks at the forms of multicultural coexistence during several centuries, the shades of prejudice and tolerance and the phases of conflict and comity. By probing the deep ambivalence that coloured relations between Poles and Jews on the eve of World War II, Shtetl throws new light on motives which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to rescue or betray their Jewish neighbours when the Nazis invaded. 'Charting the ebbs and flows of repression and tolerance, uprisings and occupation, migration and assimilation of Poland's history, "Shtetl" provides a rare and valuable analysis of the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews over the centuries. For the Jews, Poland is the symbol of murder where the Nazis set up their killing fields and where the Polish post-war response was further brutality, followed by amnesia: for the Poles, there remains a feeling of unfairness that their own wartime sufferings are overlooked. Hoffman's interest lies in rescuing the past from the evasions, concealments and half-truths demanded by post-war politics and national pride - as well as from the additions of the imagination, which all memory to some extent invokes' - Caroline Moorehead, "Daily Telegraph". 'A luminous and deeply engrossing social history' - Lisa Appignanesi, "Independent". 'This is a subtle, fair, scrupuously even-handed piece of work. It begs moral questions of us all ...Hoffman gives no answers, but she asks the questions, and observes the moral hazards with a rare sensitivity' - Julia Neuberger, "Irish Times".

History

HOFFMAN, Eva

Europe

Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, masterminded the campaigns, alliances, treaties and pageantries which brought the British Empire to its zenith in terms of power and prestige.  Prime Minister for all but four years between 1885 and 1902, it was he who, from his Jacobean palace at Hatfield, co-ordinated the subtly interlocking policies over five continents and a quarter of the globe. A profoundly unconventional aristocrat, Lord Salisbury was witty, ironic and intellectually brilliant, but there was also a ruthless, acerbic and depressive side to his nature.  In the course of a turbulent fifty-year career he won over opponents such as Disraeli and Queen Victoria, destroyed others such as Lord Randolph Churchill and Paul Kruger, brought Joseph Chamberlain and King Edward VII to heel, wrecked Gladstone's hopes for Irish Home Rule, offered secret deals to Charles Stewart Parnell and Tsar Nicholas II, saw off Otto von Bismarck and saw through Kaiser Wilhelm II.In this comprehensive new biography, written with complete access to Salisbury's papers at Hatfield House, Andrew Roberts explores every aspect of Lord Salisbury's phenomenal statesmanship, but also his eccentric family, his journalism, his distinctive philosophy of Toryism, his passion for scientific experiments and above all, his extraordinary, complex, but ultimately hugely attractive character.

Salisbury

Andrew Roberts

This, the first prize-winning volume of David Cairns' life of Berlioz, describes with unprecedented intimacy the composer's early life and career until the celebrated performance of Symphonie Fantastique in 1832. Cairns depicts a character of titanic energy and ambition in the process of becoming one of the most distinctive personalities and artists of the romantic era. In his struggles to escape his family's influence and plans, his move to Paris, and the exhausting setbacks of his early career, Berlioz emerges a figure at once recognisably modern and yet possessed by an unapproachable intensity of experience.

Berlioz: Volume One: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832

CAIRNS, David

Arts & Literature

German Lesson

LENZ, SIEGFRIED

'Quite simply, one of the great musical biographies of all time, a work that will enrich our understanding of every one of Berlioz's compositions' - "Sunday Telegraph". Berlioz was one of the towering figures of Romanticism: not only was he a great and revolutionary composer, but also the finest conductor of his day and an outstanding critic and writer. Yet throughout his life he struggled for money and his music was persistently reviled in his native France. With exceptional insight and sympathy, David Cairns draws together in this second volume the major strands of Berlioz's life: his tempestuous marriage to the actress Harriet Smithson; the genesis of his famous works, including the "Requiem", "Romeo and Juliet" and his crowning masterpiece "The Trojans"; his friendships with Mendelssohn, Liszt, Princess Wittgenstein and Wagner; and, finally, his last years haunted once again by personal tragedy. Here, as never before, is Berlioz the artist - and the man. 'Beautifully written, every word of the 700 pages worth its weight in gold. The author has a remarkable eye for fascinating detail, an infectious enthusiasm for Berlioz's music, and a fluency and keen sense of purpose in narrating what amounts to the most extraordinary real-life story classical music has to offer...This epic biography will stand as a major monument of the history of classical music and will surely, on its subject, never be surpassed' - Alexander Waugh, "Literary Review". 'One of the masterpieces of modern biography' - Rupert Christiansen, "Daily Telegraph".

Berlioz: Volume Two: Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869

The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation

Leapman, Michael

Business & Money

Extinction

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) has been hailed by Gabriel Josipovici as 'Austria's finest postwar writer' and by George Steiner as 'one of the masters of contemporary European fiction'. Faber Finds is proud to reissue a selection of four of Bernhard's finest novels. "Extinction", Bernhard's last published novel, is the story of Franz-Josef Murau - intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family - who lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg; and he must decide its fate.

thomas-bernhard

'The Sophomore by Barry Spacks is that rare beast: a clever, sophisticated novel that is very, very funny. It's like an American Lucky Jim - at once hilarious, shrewd and very true. A complete delight.' William Boyd Harry Zissel is 22 years old, a college sophomore who plans to be a major writer. He just can't seem to finish anything. Then his girlfriend Miriam announces she's pregnant. Harry fears he'll end up a married wage-slave, just like his old buddy Arthur Thompson. Leaving his apartment to get breakfast, Harry decides instead to hit the road. Can he live the American dream of 'starting afresh'? Or does he need to buck up, straighten out, do some work for a change...? The question is not for him alone in Barry Spacks' brilliant debut novel from 1968, reissued here with a new introductory Q&A with the author. 'No synopsis can do justice to Spacks's technical skill and comic inventiveness.' Saturday Review

The Sophomore

Literature & Fiction

Spacks, Barry

Contemporary

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