Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

A new approach to Thackeray. Although this study embraces all his work, it switches attention from his late novels, and bases the case for his imaginative vitality on the multifarious material - reviews, travel books, burlesques, Punch articles - that he turned out, mostly under severe financial stress, at the start of his writing career. Here was the breeding ground of Vanity Fair; here we find the subversive Thackeray, foe of humbug and high art, waylaying snobbery and the cant of social reformers with bravura and buffoonery - the Thackeray who, in Trollope's words, 'laughed, and ate, and drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion.' In portraying the range and intensity of Thackeray's imagination, topics singled out include: light and painting; ballet dancers; pantomime; haute cuisine; time's ruins; and the rainbow realm of commerce. The picture of Thackeray, as man and artist, that emerges, is fresh and challenging.

At the George, Geoffrey Moorhouse's testament to a lifelong love of rugby league, was shortlisted for the inaugural William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1989.'The very soul of rugby league, a sport that has been called 'the toughest in the world', lives within the pages of At the George. From first acquaintance some seasons ago, I believed it to be the finest book ever penned on the thirteen-a-side game... Today, the book remains as fresh as ever and as firmly placed on its pedestal... It is a seminal work, a precious treasure of the game. The book is from the heart, written by a man of intellect, who was bowled over by what he saw one May afternoon at Maine Road, Manchester, back in 1946, and who never lost his affection for the game.' Ian Head, from his new Preface to this edition

Rufus Isaacs was in his day the first commoner to rise to the rank of marquess since the Duke of Wellington. Born into a lively Jewish family, he left school aged 14, yet made his name as a brilliant QC before being elected to the Commons as a Liberal in 1904. Smeared during the Marconi scandal of 1913 he survived to be appointed Lord Chief Justice, and elevated to the peerage in 1914. He would go on to be Ambassador to the United States, Viceroy of India, and Foreign Secretary. For this major work, first published in 1982, Denis Judd drew upon private papers in order to place Rufus Isaacs' complex career in perspective and so provide an overdue reassessment of one of the most outstanding public figures of the twentieth century. 'Excellent.' A.J.P. Taylor, Observer 'A lucid and revealing book' Geoffrey Moorhouse, Times 'The best biography [of Lord Reading] to have appeared so far.' Robert Blake, Evening Standard

'It is now thirty-five years since Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote his cricket classic The Best Loved Game, which also seems unimaginable, but only because it feels like last week. Even so, in that time the game has changed, in many respects beyond recognition, which makes the book more valuable than ever - as an elegy for a lost world.' Matthew Engel, in his new PrefaceGeoffrey Moorhouse spent the summer of 1978 sampling cricket at every level: from Eton v Harrow to the Lancashire League; from Cambridge undergraduates getting a lesson from Zaheer Abbas to Ian Botham excelling with bat and ball at Lord's; from a farmer's boy making an unbeaten 24 at an Oxfordshire village match to the incomparable clowning of Derek Randall at Trent Bridge.'Surely destined to rest beside the finest works of this nature in the library of cricket.' David Frith, Wisden Cricket Monthly

'Joseph Hone went to Zaire for the BBC. His aim was a series of talks about crossing Africa from coast to coast, as Stanley had done. That intention began, and ended, in Kinshasha... Having fallen in love in boyhood with the idea of Africa, he had looked for 'great liberating spaces', and found himself in a city from which there was no escape without a private plane.' Guardian'For those who like to read, in comfort, about uncomfortable journeys, frightful hotels, dreadful meals, and broken-down capitals, I strongly recommend Children of the Country. The section on Kinshasha, in particular, is both alarming and hilarious.' Richard Cobb, Spectactor 'Books of the Year''A darkly coloured personal odyssey.... Hone hopes to achieve some kind of perspective on his unraveling marriage here in the landscape of his boyhood fantasies... His ability to articulate his own reactions to the landscape, combined with his precise notation of detail, lend his narrative freshness and vitality.' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Who is the Fool and what does he mean to us? Pre-1900 scholars thought him a Renaissance fashion, a continental import of note in the British Isles only between 1486 and the 1630s, per his appearances in Shakespeare's plays. However, as Sandra Billington shows in this pioneering study, the Fool has been with us from medieval times and has worn many guises: village idiot and sophisticated comedian, embodiment of Satan and God's own jester. He has managed, as Billington notes, 'to inspire or infect our thinking for at least eight hundred years'.

'Woman will be the death of me,' mutters Kingdom Swann, peering up at the nude woman hung by her wrists from a pillar. An impressive old man with a wonderful wealth of beard, he appears the very picture of Victorian respectability. Yet behind the walls of his Piccadilly studio the erotic fantasies of a generation are being acted out for the eye of his camera. For this master of the epic nude painting has turned his hand to pornography: art has come to life and all hell is breaking loose . . .'With enormous relish Gibson presents a memorable and hugely enjoyable portrait of both the man and the world he inhabited.' Today'As in Daniel Defoe's Roxanna, a voyeuristic fascination plays games with high morality.' Times'Wonderful fun to read.' Daily Mail

First published in 1985, Miles Gibson's phantasmagoric second novel returns to print with a new preface by the author. Wreathed in legends and haunted by ghosts, the little Dorset village of Rams Horn is a fantastical seaside world where reality ebbs and flows like the tide. A clairvoyant, waiting for her drowned husband to return from the grave, is taunted by demons, a mysterious African sailor arrives from the sea in search of lodgings, small boys spy on their mothers, and the new doctor, sitting in his empty surgery, turns to ancient remedies in a bid to cure his own love sickness. 'An imaginative tour de force and a considerable stylistic achievement... Gibson has few equals among his contemporaries.' Time Out 'An extraordinary talent dances with perfect control across hypnotic pages.' Financial Times

Last updated in 2001, John Rentoul's acclaimed Tony Blair: Prime Minister returns with an extensive new assessment of Blair's premiership after '9/11' - from the Iraq war and relations with Gordon Brown to his departure from Downing Street and political afterlife. 'Well written, thoroughly researched and informed by the balanced and subtle insights of a skilled journalist... Especially good on the influences that have shaped Mr Blair.' Economist'Utterly scrupulous in presenting the [] information... [W]hen Rentoul occasionally presents his own judgements, they can rarely be faulted.' Peter Oborne, Sunday Express'Written with care, thought... and a fine understanding of political nuances.' Ben Pimlott'An extraordinary achievement, flashing with a peculiarly devastating form of sympathy.' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday'With further updates, this biography will almost certainly become the definitive one.' Rachel Sylvester, Daily Telegraph

Academic anthropologist Stan Binstead is headed off to East Africa on sabbatical. Adulterous by nature, he's irked when his wife Millie asks to accompany him. But as the couple pass through London the balance of power in their marriage begins, strangely, to shift - a transformation that becomes yet more pronounced on safari. Sometimes considered by critics as a variation on the themes of Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macombe', Binstead's Safari was first published in 1983. 'The tone of the novel deepens into a psychological study of these two people and the subtle and complex ways in which the exotic environment works upon each of them... Ingalls' style maintains the wry grace of a sophisticated romance, a control guaranteeing that the denouement will not only be inevitable but astonishing.' Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times

'Every volume [Rachel Ingalls] has written displays the craft of a quite remarkable talent. Tales of love, terror, betrayal and grief, which others would spin out for hundreds of pages, are given the occluded force of poetry.' Amanda Craig, IndependentRachel Ingalls (b. 1940) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in London since 1965. The title-piece in this collection, first published in 1974, is the novella The Man Who Was Left Behind, which tells of a retired lawyer from the American South whose entire family has been destroyed. His grief drives him to haunt the bars, parks and laundromats of the town where he was once a respected citizen. The accompanying stories 'St. George and the Nighclub' and 'Something to Write Home About' are both set on the island of Rhodes, and both offer disquieting portraits of marriage.

'Every volume [Rachel Ingalls] has written displays the craft of a quite remarkable talent. Tales of love, terror, betrayal and grief, which others would spin out for hundreds of pages, are given the occluded force of poetry.' Amanda Craig, IndependentRachel Ingalls (b. 1940) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in London since 1965. Theft, her literary debut, won the Authors' Club First Novel Award for 1970.'Theft is a parable-parallel taking place in some dehumanizing, militarized society where Seth, a starving working man, is jailed for stealing a loaf of bread. In prison with him is a manic-messiah, a wife-killer, some affluent youngsters doing their 'mental slumming' via protest, and his protective, smarter brother-in-law.' Kirkus Review 'Imaginative and intelligent'. Sunday Times 'Tautly told with great power.' Sunday Mirror

Miles Gibson's cult novel from 1984 returns to print with a new preface by the author.Growing up in a small hotel in a shabby seaside town, lonely William 'Mackerel' Burton amuses himself by perfecting his conjuring tricks. In adult life his magic turns lethal as he stalks the streets of London - the butcher in rubber gloves, the acrobat called Death. He is the Sandman. 'A splendidly macabre achievement... As an account of descent into homicidal mania it has seldom been bettered.' Time Out'Unspeakable acts are reported with an unwavering reasonableness essential to the comic impact...' Times Literary Supplement 'Written by a virtuoso - it luxuriates in death with a Jacobean fervour.' Sydney Morning Herald

'I go the zoo half because I like looking at the animals and half because I like looking at the people... The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie - all these we get from the Zoo.' In 1938 Louis MacNeice published his second collection of poems with Faber; his 'personal essay' Modern Poetry for OUP; and Zoo, a prose commission from Michael Joseph to write an impressionistic 'guide' to the London Zoo in Regents Park. Envisioned as a breezy assignment MacNeice's Zoo inevitably became a richer endeavour, taking in side-trips to Paris and Belfast. Zoo also benefited from illustrations by the painter Nancy Sharp, with whom MacNeice had begun an affair after moving to London in 1936.This Faber Finds edition returns to circulation a delightful rarity by one of the twentieth century's most brilliant poets.

'A fascinating account of an extraordinary father by his son.' Lord Rees-Mogg Who was Major Kavan Elliott? Womaniser, rogue, wartime saboteur, peacetime spy - even all of these?Behind the cover of a seemingly respectable business career, Elliott was entangled in a complex web of deception, glamorous women, Communist double agents and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo and Hungarian secret police. Was the man who dropped blind into Serbia in 1942 on a mission for SOE a courageous daredevil or a philandering scoundrel? This is the extraordinary true story of the quest undertaken by Kavan Elliott's son to discover the truth about his father. From the torture chambers of Budapest to the classified archives of the British Secret Intelligence Service, I Spy reveals an astonishing legacy of espionage, betrayal, romance and double-dealing. This Faber Finds edition includes a new afterword by Geoffrey Elliot, drawing on hitherto secret documents.

Newly updated to 2012 and the Leveson Inquiry, Stick It Up Your Punter! is the classic story of the Sun newspaper, its part in the rise of Rupert Murdoch's business empire, and the extraordinary role it came to play in British society and politics. From Murdoch's purchase and rebranding of the old loss-making Sun in 1969, through the soaraway-successful and often scandalous years of success under foul-mouthed editor Kelvin MacKenzie, to the 'phone-hacking' disgrace of 2012 which put Murdoch's business affairs under scrutiny as never before - this is the story of the paper that, for better or worse, redefined 'tabloid journalism'.'[This] anarchic account... could be a script for Carry On Up Fleet Street.' Alan Rusbridger, Guardian'The funniest book of the year, perhaps of the decade.' Times'Splendidly racy.' Economist'A story which social and political historians of the 20th century will not find easy to ignore.' London Review of Books

After Pusan, first published in 1995, is the third panel (alongside Blindfold Games and Coastwise Lights, also in Faber Finds) of a triptych of memoirs by Alan Ross. Inspired by Ross's visit in 1986 to the South Korean coastal city of Pusan, like its predecessors it gracefully entwines poetry and prose. 'After Pusan opens with a thirty-page prose memoir of [Ross's] visit, economically and self-effacingly told, deft in its detail and tireless in its curiosity... This memoir is more than merely an adjunct to Ross's other travel writings, though, and more than only a prelude to the poems which fill the rest of these hundred pages. After Pusan breaks a long silence in his life as a poet; and it was that visit to Korea... that suggested to him 'that if poetry was ever going to come again it might do so now.' PN Review

The Tree of the Sun, first published in 1978, begins where Wilson Harris's previous novel Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness ended, and thus forms a sequel.The London-dwelling Brazilian painter Da Silva is deeply moved by his wife's pregnancy after eight years of marriage. As he contemplates the child to be born he recalls a painting he began on the very morning he and his wife made love and conception occurred: a painting that contained a growing image. This becomes the evolving 'foetus' of imagination through which Da Silva begins to relate himself and his wife to the former (childless) tenants of their Kensington flat. 'I must admire the imagination and force of Wilson Harris' writing.' Kevin Cully, Tribune

First published in 1972, Ian Whitcomb's After the Ball is an exuberant account of the origins and explosion of popular music, informed by the author's store of experience in the field as a pop sensation of The Sixties.'Brash, learned, funny and perspicacious.... The author of this free-wheeling, diverting history was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, when he created a rock hit 'You Turn Me On,' and experienced a brief, bewildering season as a touring rock celebrity. This book... is his effort to explain that experience to himself, and, well-educated man that he is, he goes all the way back to the first pop bestseller (in sheet music, of course), 'After The Ball,' and all the way forward to the 1960s.' New Yorker 'One of the best books on popular music to come along in the last few years.... Whitcomb's own involvement with music constantly surfaces to make the book both revealing and highly enjoyable.' Seattle Times

Arguably the most important popular British composer of the 20th century, John Barry (1933-2011) enjoyed a career that spanned over fifty years, in which time he won five Academy Awards for pictures includingBorn Free, Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves. His reputation was further gilded by his soundtracks for a dozen James Bond films between 1962 and 1987. Barry,s career reflects the evolution of post-war British music from big band to rock and roll and the birth of pop. In the cultural foment of ,Swinging Sixties, London he became an iconic figure and an inspiration to countless musicians. Written with Barry,s cooperation and including insights from close friends, Eddi Fiegel's John Barry: A Sixties Theme celebrates a life of stunning creativity , recreates an unforgettable era in British culture, and reveals how John Barry came to write his music and why.

The Pearlkillers, first published in 1986, is a collection of four novellas: 'Third Time Lucky', 'People to People', 'Captain Hendrik's Story', and 'Inheritance', the action of which gives the volume its title. '[Rachel Ingalls'] characters all bear the mark of Cain: They are innocents (no matter that some may be killers) who are swept along through tepid, flat circumstances until suddenly all hell breaks loose, and the Furies erupt to claim their prey... In her best work, Ingalls is as monochromatic as Edgar Allan Poe, going straight to her target with the same ease and surety as an arrow skims to its bull's-eye... And just as Poe's craft was exactly suited to the conventions of the short story form, so Ingalls' vision is exactly suited to the length and scope of the novella... Like Poe, Rachel Ingalls is more than a master storyteller: She is also a superb artist.' Los Angeles Times

'Rachel Ingalls writes the kind of macabre, fantastic and haunting fiction called American Gothic... Its antecedents lie not in the hysterical 18th-century rebellion against reason, but in Jacobean tragedy, and in the complicated American relations with greed and Puritanism. Ingalls is one of the most brilliant practitioners of this Gothic since Poe... Black Diamond is a collection of five short stories, loosely linked by the theme of kinship. Ghoulish and gripping, they all begin in an atmosphere of unsophisticated tranquillity...' Amanda Craig, Independent'The stories in Black Diamond... wrap themselves insidiously around your curiosity, and draw you with them.' Sunday Times'[Ingalls'] vision evokes a world where psychosis and extreme violence stalk the American dream.' Time Out

Between the disintegration of the Liberal Party in 1915 and the election of Harold Wilson's Labour in 1964, Britain weathered a turbulent half-century including two world wars and many profound socio-political changes. What did not survive this tumult was Britain's sea-based Empire, as the great land-based USA and USSR now assumed dominance. With customary wit, scholarship and wisdom Robert Blake guides the reader through Britain's slow decline from the world's premier power to a nation with no military commitments East of Suez: still important, wishing to see itself as 'a cut above the rest', but now effectively no better than third-ranking. '[T]he most successful sections [are] the four brilliant chapters on the Second World War... But it is not only for these that The Decline of Power should be read. It is a fair-minded book... fluently, even racily written...' Peter Pulzer, London Review of Books

After all the endeavours that combined to make Britain the first great industrial nation, that dominant position was then relinquished. Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914), the driven and self-made Birmingham businessman who shifted his energies formidably into politics, might have appeared to be one leader well equipped to help Britain stay competitive in the global race for economic growth. But, as Michael Balfour suggests in this absorbing study, Chamberlain's personality and temperament were not suited to the challenge. Determined always to have his way, animated by 'the business man's love of getting things done', Chamberlain lacked the gift of persuasion and made enemies too well, it being his unique achievement to split both major parties in the space of twenty years. Had it been possible for one man to arrest Britain's slackening growth then that man, Balfour contends, was not the erstwhile 'Radical Joe.'

Indian prince, Sussex and England cricketer, K.S. Ranjitsinhji was unique in many ways. W.G. Grace predicted that there would not be another batsman like 'Ranji' for a hundred years; arguably we are still waiting. His prodigious run-scoring ability alone assured his place in the annals of cricket, but his talents transcended statistics. His batting married subtlety and strength in a way that was quite new to the game, and he was a 'character' and crowd-pleaser from his century-making test debut in 1896 to his withdrawal from cricket in 1907 after he was installed as Jam Saheb of Nawanagar. 'A splendid memorial... In Alan Ross, Ranji is perfectly matched with one of the best writers the game ever attracted.' Guardian'A gem of a book.' Yorkshire Post

'This valedictory volume is the quintessence of [Alan] Ross, a deft and deceptively airy set of literary wanderings through a part of the Mediterranean - the islands of the south-western coast of Italy - he had known since being demobilised from the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War... Ross's memoir is a showcase for a supremely poetic sensibility, and a naturally gifted writer with an unerring eye for detail, reporting on his experience with an infectiously joyous lyricism.' Eldon King, Observer'A fund of associative literary information that could only have been amassed by a passionate reader. Gorky, Ibsen, Rilke, DH Lawrence, Walter Benjamin, Pablo Neruda and scores more wrote in or near Ischia; Ross describes their books and their lives with detailed succinctness, en route dipping in and out of his own thoughts and travel observations.' Helen Simpson, Guardian

In this 1967 novel Wilson Harris explores the spiritual and psychic realities beyond the mundane facts of relationships, boldly constructing his story on the basis of fragments.When the Forrestals died in an explosion that wrecked their home and destroyed most of its contents, there survived a disjointed diary - or 'log book', as Susan Forrestal called it. She had suffered from an affliction of the eyes which, after three operations, left her almost blind. Abandoned by her lover, who disappeared without a trace, she eventually married a kind and solicitous husband; nevertheless her lover continued to haunt her in such a way that his presence had an almost living reality.'I admire Wilson Harris's novels greatly; he is one of the very few living novelists whose works are too brief for my tastes.' Anthony Burgess

'Jan Marsh's book is the best researched and fullest biography of Rossetti we have yet had.' Fiona MacCarthy, New York Review of Books'Although never formally part of the Pre-Raphaelite poetic school, which included her brother Gabriel, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne, Christina Rossetti has always been linked to it. [Jan Marsh] gives full attention to both the individual and her unique variety of fantastic and devotional poetry... Marsh delineates an appealing person while examining her adolescent nervous breakdown, abortive engagement to a lapsed Catholic painter, frustrated love for an absentminded scholar, and relationships with her devout but hearty sister, Maria, and with her brothers... The author's steady, sympathetic course through Rossetti's divided life enables readers to delve into the intense and original self most fully expressed in her poetry.' Kirkus Review

In 1960, against most predictions, the England cricket team won their first ever series in the West Indies. Even against a home side boasting Hall and Watson, Worrell, Sobers and Ramadhin, the visitors - fuelled by the bowling of Trueman and Statham and a batting order including Dexter, Barrington and Subba Row - emerged triumphant over five tests.Alan Ross describes the action in graphic detail, including some violent scenes at Port-of-Spain. And as always he paints vivid pictures in words of all that he saw outside of the cricket grounds, from Spanish Town, Jamaica, to Nelson's dockyard in Antigua, and the carnival in Trinidad.'Alan Ross has established himself as one of the most graceful and cultured of cricket writers.' Times

Memoirs of an Unjust Fella, first published in 1980, is the autobiography of James Maude Richards (1907-1992): a personal account from the heart of the twentieth century's high controversies over modern architecture. 'The anonymity of a Times byline - 'Our Architectural Correspondent' - was, in some ways, the crowning achievement of [J.M. Richards'] public career. It made him the connection between architecture and the Establishment, a role for which he was peculiarly well fitted by background (Anglo-Irish, Church, Army and some land), training (Architectural Association School, plus practice in London, Ireland and North America) and professional experience as the editor of the Architectural Review on and off since 1935. And he knew absolutely everybody... Among the illustrations to Unjust Fella, there is a group photograph of the entire Modern Movement in architecture (the lot, bar Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe), and there's Jim, modestly in the back row but practically in the middle.'Reyner Banham, London Review of Books