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Orwell
Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, D J Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. Moving and revealing, Taylor's Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero.
Real Life
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Kept
A stuffed bear, a pet mouse, fraud and felony on the streets of London, and strange goings-on in the fens... Full of suspense and teeming with life, Kept is a Victorian mystery about the curious things men do to get - and keep - what they want. August 1863. Henry Ireland, a failed landowner, dies unexpectedly in a riding accident, and his young widow disappears. Three years later his friend James Dixey, a celebrated naturalist, is found dead on his grounds with his throat torn out. Are these deaths connected? What has happened to Mrs Ireland? And what are the sinister bonds that link these men to the poaching of osprey eggs in Scotland, the doomned romance of Dixey's kitchen maid and the first Great Train Robbery?
Returning
Three fictional journeys in search of the place one came from, and the bitter discoveries that lie in wait.In Real Life, a veteran of the Soho skin trade returns to his native Norwich, only to find that the past has followed him home.In Trespass, the former henchman of a disgraced City tycoon sits in an East coast hotel slowly unravelling the truth about the fractures of his early life.In The Comedy Man, the surviving half of a once-famous comedy duo tries to come to terms with the unfinished business of his career.These three novels were originally published in 1992, 1998 and 2001. Menacing and humorous by turns, each is an intensely imaginative exploration of the difficulties of going back to the places and people who made us what we are. They confirm D. J. Taylor as one of the best writers of his generation.
English Settlement
Nervously monitored from a twelfth-floor eyrie near Blackfriars, Scott Marshall’s world looks as if it’s falling apart. It’s late 1990 in the City of London, the Iraqis are in Kuwait, the Old Lady’s sick (Mrs Thatcher, not the Bank of England) and the wild times are over. The only thing a thirtysomething Anglo-American with a job at KLS, the legendarily predatory management consultants, an eating phobia and some exalted social connections can do is sit tight and weather the storm. Walham Town, the struggling fourth division football side (‘We’re not one of your glamour clubs’) now launched on an unlooked-for cup-run by their megalomaniac chairman, seems a safe bolt-hole. But Wa...
Derby Day
It's Derby Day and all of England is heading for the Epsom Downs. Society beauties rub shoulders with Whitechapel street girls, as every class of society gathers with high hopes and taut nerves for the greatest race of the year. All through winter, from London to France, plans have been laid, money exchanged, disputes begun. And uniting the destinies of old Mr Gresham and his tigerish daughter, the rakish Mr Happerton and his crony Captain Raff, brooding Mr Davenant, Mr Pardew the burglar and detective Captain McTurk is the champion horse Tiberius. In this rich and exuberant novel, rife with the idioms of Victorian England, the mysteries pile high, propelling us towards the day of the great race, and we wait with bated breath as the story gallops to a finish that no one expects. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011.
The New Book of Snobs
'Hugely enjoyable' AN Wilson, Sunday Times 'Thoughtful, entertaining and enjoyable' Michael Gove, Book of the Week, The Times Inspired by William Makepeace Thackeray, the first great analyst of snobbery, and his trail-blazing The Book of Snobs (1848), D. J. Taylor brings us a field guide to the modern snob. Short of calling someone a racist or a paedophile, one of the worst charges you can lay at anybody's door in the early twenty-first century is to suggest that they happen to be a snob. But what constitutes snobbishness? Who are the snobs and where are they to be found? Are you a snob? Am I? What are the distinguishing marks? Snobbery is, in fact, one of the keys to contemporary British li...
Lost Girls
Who were the Lost Girls? At least a dozen or so young women at large in Blitz-era London have a claim to this title. But Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, they cut a swathe through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt and was flogged by him on the steps of the Royal Palace. And all of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly.
On Nineteen Eighty-Four
The essential backstory to the creation and meaning of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century—and now the twenty-first. Since its publication nearly seventy years ago, George Orwell’s 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of “alternative facts.” The world we live in is often described as an Orwellian one, awash in inescapable surveillance and invasions of privacy. On Nineteen Eighty-Four dives deep into Orwell’s life to c...
Great Eastern Land
Between walking by the river and imbibing tasteless liquor at Dr Feelgood’s, a mice-infested emporium presided over by the dubious Mousookseem, David Castell is compiling his Notebooks. Though thwarted by Caro, who runs the house, buys the ink, and sullenly disapproves of his master’s activities, David perseveres, believing the past to be ‘an infinitely more agreeable subject for speculation than the future’. David’s notebooks glide between past and present, juxtaposing a number of settings: Oxford, where drunken eccentrics try to steer clear of sinister dons; East Anglia, where myth and legend are flourishing between the wide expanse of sky and field; and another, distant Eastern ...
