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A Sultry Month
Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting). Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo . 'One of the most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years.' Observer 'Never bettered.' Guardian 'W holly original.' Craig Brown 'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes 'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes 'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining....
Horatio's Version
What happened after the end of Hamlet, when the four corpses had been borne away? How did Horatio carry out the Prince's dying injunction to 'tell my story'? Alethea Hayter's narrative takes the form of the proceedings of a Court of Enquiry with Voltimand as Chairman, alternating with Horatio's commentary in his diary. As the one witness who knows all the facts, Horatio at first hopes he can bring out the truth by sticking to essentials, keeping out of the case the women, the voyage to England and, of course, the Ghost he was solemnly sworn not to mention to a living soul. But he finds himself up against formidable resistance . . . This is a brilliant imaginative reconstruction, a work of virtuosity that immediately makes you want to re-read the play. In addition to this title, Faber Finds is reissuing the following of Alethea Hayter's titles: "Opium and the Romantic Imagination," "A Sultry Month," "A Voyage in Vain" and "Mrs Browning."
The Wreck of the Abergavenny
This book is about one of the great maritime disasters in British History, the sinking of the Abergavenny. A little known fact of history is that John Wordsworth, brother of William and Dorothy, was the captain of the Abergavenny who died tragically and heroically in the disaster. Alethea has used this story as a way into the story of the Wordsworth family and their friends. She paints an intimate picture of the their daily lives and family realtionships.
Opium and the Romantic Imagination
Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better, or worse, or differently? Does it alter the quality of their consciousness, shape their imagery, influence their technique? For the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, many of whom experimented with opium and some of whom were addicted to it, this was an important question, but it has never been fully answered. In this study Alethea Hayter examines the work of five writers - Crabbe, Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilkie Collins and Francis Thompson - who were opium addicts for many years, and of several other writers - notably Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, but also Walter Scott, Dickens, Mrs Browning, James Thomson and others...
A Voyage in Vain
In the spring of 1804 Coleridge sailed to the Mediterranean in the hope of restoring his health, recreating his poetic energies and solving his emotional problems. During the voyage he kept a very detailed diary. This title combines the pleasures of researched biography, and criticism and social history, with the narrative sweep of a novel.
Nightmare in Berlin
Available for the first time in English, here is an unforgettable portrayal by a master novelist of the physical and psychological devastation wrought in the homeland by Hitler’s war. Late April, 1945. The war is over, yet Dr Doll, a loner and ‘moderate pessimist’, lives in constant fear. By night, he is haunted by nightmarish images of the bombsite in which he is trapped — he, and the rest of Germany. More than anything, he wishes to vanquish the demon of collective guilt, but he is unable to right any wrongs, especially in his position as mayor of a small town in north-east Germany that has been occupied by the Red Army. Dr Doll flees for Berlin, where he finds escape in a morphine addiction: each dose is a ‘small death’. He tries to make his way in the chaos of a city torn apart by war, accompanied by his young wife, who shares his addiction. Fighting to save two lives, he tentatively begins to believe in a better future. Written with Fallada’s distinctive power and vividness, Nightmare in Berlin captures the demoralised and desperate atmosphere of post-war Germany in a way that has never been matched or surpassed.
Thinking with History
In this book, the distinguished historian Carl Schorske--author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siécle Vienna--draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellectual and artistic fields, Schorske argues, twentieth-century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science--all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space. This is in stark contrast to the historicism of the nineteenth century, he argues, when ideas about the ...
Dreams of Authority
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