You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
At the age of 18 months, Jonathan Fryer was adopted into a prosperous business family in Greater Manchester, but he felt like a fish out of water there. When his adoptive father started interfering with him sexually, his only dream was to get away as far as possible. The seeds were thus sown for him to take on the life of a foreign correspondent, beginning with his leaving home at the age of 18 to cover the Vietnam War. Eccles Cakes is beautifully written, poignantly touching, disarmingly frank. Michael Bloch Jonathan Fryer graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Oriental Studies. After a spell working for Reuters News Agency he became a freelance writer and broadcaster, working mainly for the BBC and Middle Eastern television channels. A familiar voice from Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent, he is the author of a dozen volumes of history, biography and current affairs. He was finally reunited with his birth family in 2014.
In a compelling narrative of moral courage and personal integrity, this biography tells the story of Robert Baldwin Ross, the man who first seduced Oscar Wilde and never wavered in his loyalty to the flamboyant wit and playwright. Unfailingly, Ross stood by Wilde through the scandals that shocked a nation, through his much-publicized trials and imprisonment, at his deathbed in Paris—and thereafter dedicated himself to defending the reputation of his famous friend.
The remarkable story of Robbie Ross, the young Canadian who first seduced Oscar Wilde in London, is a tribute to devoted friendship and loyalty in a late Victorian milieu in which duplicity and subterfuge were more the norm. Ross not only helped Wilde discover his true nature but also stood by him during the playwright's tempestuous relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the scandal of the subsequent trials and the purgatory of imprisonment with hard labour. When Wilde was released from jail, Ross was waiting for him in France and endeavoured to manage his finances. After Wilde's death, as his literary executor, Ross steered the estate out of debt and worked tirelessly to restore Wilde's sha...
In the Autumn of 1891, Oscar Wilde set about conquering literary Paris. Gide was dazzled by the Irishman's energy and verve, but was driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by Wilde's merciless paradoxes and questioning of religious faith. The two writers met repeatedly over the next ten years in France, Italy, and North Africa, both before and after Wilde's imprisonment. But by the time Wilde died in Paris in 1900, the tables had been turned. He was impoverished and disgraced, while Gide was well launched on a literary career that would make him the most famous French writer of his generation and win him the Nobel Prize. Andre and Oscar charts the stormy emotions of the Gide-Wilde friendship as well as the influence they had on each other. But it also looks at the two men's live through the eyes of their mothers, their wives, and their lovers, documented largely through diaries and letters from the period and illustrated with contemporary photographs. The book also provides an often surprising insight into what W. H. Auden would much later call the "Homintern" - an international network of gay men and their young companions - as well as the moral hypocrisy of the 1890s.
Kurdistan is one of the Middle East's great recent success stories. The area occupies much of what is now northern and north-eastern Iraq. The Kurds have a distinguished and eventful history; their capital, Erbil, claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city. Occupying strategically important lands and formidable mineral reserves, the region has from ancient times been a magnet for invaders.
None
In 1939, as war loomed, Peter Gumbel’s Jewish-born grandparents fled Nazi Germany for England. But within a matter of decades, their grandson, appalled by the Brexit referendum, had become a citizen of the country they fled eighty years ago. How had it come to this? Drawing on one family’s migration stories, Citizens of Everywhere explores the nature of belonging amid cycles of pluralism and nationalism. In an increasingly global world, nativist and diasporic impulses pull many people in contradictory directions that can be difficult to even understand. In Citizens of Everywhere, Gumbel grapples with this complexity through his own family history, revealing the personal costs of Britain’s recent isolationist retreat. Along the way, he laments the decline of British pluralism at the worst possible moment—as it rejects the European project and engages in an ill-fated struggle against an ever more interconnected world.
Biography of the first Prime Minister of the 20th Century during the height of the British Empire