Bücher von Paul Strathern

A sweeping 400-year history of the Florentines who gave birth to the Renaissance, by the author of The Medici and The Borgias.

These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion.

Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in an entertaining and accessible fashion.

Marseilles, 1891: as Arthur Rimbaud lies dying in hospital, his mind wanders fitfully - taking him back to Commune-era Paris, and the scandalous life he led with Verlaine. But, above all, he is transported to Harar, Abyssinia, where he ventured in 1880 to seek his fortune, having chucking in the disreputable game of writing poetry...Paul Strathern's second novel, published in 1972, won a Somerset Maugham Award both for its superb evocation of the colour, squalor and hurlyburly of Harar and for its inspired 'impersonation' of Rimbaud - restless, ragged self-overcomer, would-be explorer-imperialist, and genius poet repulsed by his past literary life. In a new preface to this edition Strathern discusses the mercurial personality of Rimbaud, his novel's bold shifts between first and third person, and his own travels in East Africa that informed the book.