Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

Every so often a Test match offers such high drama as to transcend the series of which it was part. Such a battle was the second Test between England and West Indies at Lord's in June 1963. Wisden called it one of the most dramatic played in England. Alan Ross's eyewitness account amply evokes its excitement. Lord's was packed with supporters of both sides, and the two teams, led by Ted Dexter and Frank Worrell, were very strong. West Indies had Garry Sobers and the pace attack of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, against whom Dexter's first innings 70 was noteworthy. Fred Trueman took 11 wickets for England, though he could not stop a colossal century by Basil Butcher. But England's final innings run-chase would be distinguished by one courageous knock from Brian Close, and a commensurately brave effort by Colin Cowdrey.

Alan Ross (1922-2001) - distinguished poet, travel writer, and editor of London Magazine - also managed to excel in the role of cricket correspondent for the Observer, in which capacity he followed England/MCC on tours of Australia, South Africa and the West Indies. In the book-length accounts he published of these tours, his lifelong love of the game found glorious expression. Cape Summer and the Australians in England (1957) treats the 1956 Ashes series, memorable above all for the bowling performance of Jim Laker; and the following winter's MCC tour to apartheid South Africa, where one of England's strongest ever sides had an unexpectedly tough contest and where, as ever, Ross's discerning eye and finessing pen were alive to dimensions of the game beyond the boundary rope.

Wilson Harris's tenth novel, first published in 1972, is set in Edinburgh but, like much of his subsequent work, bridges continents by its imaginative reach.''Doctor Black Marsden', tramp, shaman, and conjurer, is an ambivalent Merlin-figure representing both the hero's personal (and archetypal) shadow, and the creative, magus-like activity of the author himself.' Michael Gilkes, Journal of Commonwealth Literature'... my many visits to Scotland, and books I have read, have given me the sensation of a tone or inner vibrancy that may be due to the languages (English, Scottish, Gaelic) that are present in the subconscious imagination of sensitive Scots... [These] make for the cross-culturality (not mono-cultural) that came into play in Black Marsden.' Wilson Harris, 2008

Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett, Endgame was given its first London performance at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957.HAMM: Clov!CLOV: Yes.HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.CLOV: There's no more nature.HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.CLOV: In the vicinity.HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!CLOV: Then she hasn't forgotten us.

Alan Ross (1922-2001) - distinguished poet, travel writer, and editor of London Magazine - also managed to excel in the role of cricket correspondent for the Observer, in which capacity he followed England/MCC on tours of Australia, South Africa and the West Indies. In the book-length accounts he published of these tours, his lifelong love of the game found glorious expression. Australia 63 offers Ross's account of an Ashes series that pitted the England XI led by Ted Dexter against Richie Benaud's host side. On paper England had talent to spare, including the recall to the team of ordained minister David Sheppard, and the renowned bowling attack of Fred Trueman and Brian Statham. But Benaud's Australian side had strength in depth too. Both captains were expressly committed to playing entertaining cricket. The reality, however, did not quite live up to the billing.

In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist, working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the contemporary writer. Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do, but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.

The harshly magnificent landscape of the Elan Valley in Mid Wales was changed utterly in the late 1890s by a reservoir building project initiated by the Corporation of Birmingham in order to supply water to that expanding city. A great feat of civil engineering, the project required the flooding of land by the River Elan and the compensating of local landowners; but also made a tremendous impact on the traditions, rights and privileges of the local commoners, and on a flock system of hill farming that had existed for hundreds of years. Originally published in 1969, The Valley is Elizabeth Clarke's account of hill farming life in the Elan Valley and the massive changes wrought upon it between the first period of reservoir construction and a subsequent project that followed the Second World War.

Alan Ross (1922-2001) - distinguished poet, travel writer, and editor of London Magazine - also managed to excel in the role of cricket correspondent for the Observer, in which capacity he followed England/MCC on tours of Australia, South Africa and the West Indies. In the book-length accounts he published of these tours, his lifelong love of the game found glorious expression. Australia 55 offers Ross's perspectives on the battle for the Ashes, the visiting side led by Len Hutton, and Ross's own vivid first impressions of the host country. 'The massive fluctuations of the series - England, overwhelmed in Brisbane, won in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide to retain the Ashes - engaged [Ross's] interest; his fascination with Len Hutton, a 'lonely figure struck down by as many disasters as any overworked hero in Greek mythology', deepened...' Gideon Haigh, Cricinfo

'So the recruiters, rolling up their sleeves, varied the appeal to pride, honour, manliness and vengeance with warnings to eschew shame, disgrace, betrayal, sloth and cowardice. From a poster showing the ruins of Belgium a woman asked, 'Will you go or must I?'' First published in 1980, Dear Old Blighty is E.S. Turner's superb account of life 'on the home front' in Britain during the Great War of 1914-1918: a time of conscription, propaganda, 'spy fever', industrial unrest in the arms factories, and grieving families turning to spiritualism. When even the blind were being recruited to serve as listening sentries for approaching Zeppelins, all were expected to contribute to the war effort; and, as Turner shows us, the means of exhortation (and the penalties for non-compliance) were many. 'No matter where you open a page, you learn something you feel you should have known.' Miles Kington, Independent

The late 1950s, twilight years of the British Empire, saw the end of the era of the 'tramp steamer' - coal-burning merchant ships that 'tramped' from port to port in the days before bulk carriers, hunting for any cargo that needed hauling to any place.In this marvelous memoir Christopher Lee offers the diaries of a 'Lad' much like himself who, at the age of 17, took his first job aboard the tramp ship Empire Heywood. Over two years this Lad would get to travel through the Suez canal, into the Indian Ocean and across the Pacific - so acquiring a panoramic view of the fading empire - before returning home to England as a man. The diaries give a splendid account of all the dramas of life aboard ship, with an eccentric cast of characters and a wealth of lively seafaring language. A third-person narrative from the author provides invaluable historical context.

'The best one-volume study of Churchill yet available.' David Cannadine, Observer'Magisterial.' Vernon Bogdanor, New Statesman'A tour de force... A masterly chronicle of Churchill as a domestic figure rather than as the bulldog wartime leader, and one of the most subtle portraits of him as a politician. Addison revises the view of Churchill as uninterested and out of his depth in domestic affairs, painting instead a nuanced picture of a canny parliamentarian. Churchill changed parties twice but managed to accomplish the change, writes Addison, 'with exceptional dexterity', making it appear as if he were maintaining his principles while the parties changed theirs... Addison's most interesting assertion is that the rise of Hitler saved Churchill from drifting into right-wing irrelevance. Most impressively, Addison doesn't settle for easy classifications, admitting that 'Churchill... is a man of whom almost everything that can be said is true in part.'' Kirkus Review

'He gave his name to the longest, and one of the most important, British administrations of the nineteenth century. Yet the man himself has remained a shadowy figure.' Norman Gash, from the introductionPrime Minister at the time of the battle of Waterloo, Robert Banks Jenkinson, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was in power from 1812 to 1827. But despite his seeing off the threat of Napoleon, and being British premier during the turbulent years of Peterloo, the Six Acts and the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, Lord Liverpool was later dubbed the 'Arch-Mediocrity' by Disraeli, and was generally forgotten, eclipsed by the events of his day. This biography, first published in 1984, brings both the man and his politics out of the shadows.

'An excellent book.' Angus Calder, London Review of Books First published in 1985, based on an acclaimed BBC TV series, Paul Addison's Now The War is Over examines the great changes in British society that followed hard upon what had been the most destructive war ever known: years of recovery and reform, as Britain was reshaped by high ideals and a collective desire to enjoy the fruits and opportunities of peacetime.Labour was elected in 1945 on a wave of what Addison calls 'Forties collectivism.' Soon Britons would have the benefits of Beveridge's Welfare State, new housing, secondary education for all and, in July 1948, the dawning of the National Health Service. But new interests in consumerism and the pursuit of affluence were also emerging and, as Addison shows in this rich and fascinating study, would prove just as influential as the efforts of government.

'It is a melancholy thought that as soon as reforms are put into practice, disillusionment enters the political scene...'Norman Gash's Ford Lectures, originally delivered at Oxford in 1964, address an era of reform that followed the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and the Reform Act of 1832. The history of this period has often focused on the conflicts that proved necessary before the Acts came to pass. But it was only after 1832 that the real crisis of reform emerged: the clash between what had actually been done, and what men thought should be the consequences of what had been done. As Gash notes of the arguments over the Reform Bill of 1831, "e;substantially the foundations for the Victorian two-party system were laid by the divisions of politicians into Reformers and Conservatives."e;

'People of the Book is set in the Thirty Years' War, which began and still shapes our present system of world order. David Stacton's incomparable prose reveals how the treatises of scholars and the tactics of commanders so rarely comprehend the vagaries of the human condition. A book to put on the shelf with Thucydides' Peloponnesian War and Tolstoy's War and Peace.'Professor Charles Hill (author of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order)'A troubling and fantastic book... Stacton sets up a duel plot. One follows the fortunes of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, the other recounts the fate of an orphaned boy and his little sister who try to make their way across Germany from their ruined home to refuge with an imagined uncle.' Life'[An] extraordinary evocation of the whole spiritual climate of the time; the very vapours of Teutonic mists seem to rise from its pages.' Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times

In our time, Bernard Leach has done for pottery what Henry Moore has done for scuplture. This... infinitely rewarding book is an account of his pilgrimage through life.' TimesBernard Leach (1887-1979) was as renowned in Japan and the East as in Europe and America, both as an artist-craftsman and as a thinker. His interpretation of the traditions of the Orient in the making of pots - and in evolving a philosophy of life - was a lodestar for many potters in the West.Beyond East and West, first published in 1978, is more than an autobiography. Full of sharply-etched and amusing recollections, it contains much of Leach's deeper thought and a great deal too about the practical application of his ideas. Its recurrent theme is the meeting of East and West at all levels - artistic, cultural, social, political.

'Dancer in Darkness is a unique three-way collaboration - the tragic tale of the murdered Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi, as told in Renaissance Italian sources, then in The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster's masterpiece of Jacobean revenge and fate, and now here by David Stacton, the literally incomparable American historical novelist. Black as stage velvet, Stacton's version is as full of chilling insights and dreadful doings as Webster's, but at bottom all his own.' John Crowley (Little, Big, Engine Summer)'The prose of David Stacton is like that of no other writer. It suggests a corridor in a dark Gothic tower, ill-lit by tapers, at one end of which a gong sounds incessantly. Stacton's gong clashes are malevolent aphorisms, asides spoken to Nemesis, hard little explanations of motive.' Time

'Segaki is the story of two men, a woman, a dog, and a handful of snails. It is a very simple story. But like most simple stories, it is also a parable... It is the third volume of three novels concerned with various aspects of the religious experience... Segaki deals with [the] getting of wisdom, or insight, and deals with it, moreover, entirely in terms of Zen... Zen cannot be explained. It can only be embodied, and in that form, shown to people who will not see it unless they were accustomed to seeing it there anyway.' David Stacton, 1957 'I am enormously impressed by this... I haven't read such an electrifying work in ages. [Stacton] sounds not only like a magnificent poet but an initiate as well. And he seems to know Japan (the everlasting one) better than most Japanese...' Henry Miller (in a letter of October 1959)

With Chris Trengove and Peter LawrenceIn 1967 Peter 'Dougal' Butler became a roadie for The Who and their mercurial genius drummer Keith Moon. Soon he would be Moon's personal assistant, chauffeur, and all-purpose wingman. The ride lasted a tumultuous ten years, ending just prior to Moon's untimely death in 1978. Full Moon is Butler's memoir of that ride: essential reading for Who fans, and a masterclass in the mayhem caused by rock 'n' roll excess. 'The most candid insight into the Who star's life.' Daily Star 'Written in a wonderful fast, racy style, Runyonesque and full of good jokes.' Girl About Town 'A welcome change from the usual bland rock book reportage... Butler clearly has a deep and lasting affection for Moon.' Andy Gill, NME 'Certainly outrageous, sometimes funny, but mostly a sad account of life with a talented neurotic.' Daily Mirror

During the years when George IV ruled the United Kingdom, first as Prince Regent then as King, his extravagant tastes served to characterize the times - the Regency period being identified strongly with new trends in British architecture, fashion and culture. The literary expression of this era was the genre of so-called 'silver fork' novels set in fashionable London society. Initially devoured as authentic insights into the rarefied world of the best social circles, these novels were thus serving as etiquette primers for growing numbers of nouveaux riches. The detail and decor of the novels gives them an enduring socio-historical interest, hence the value of Alison Adburgham's study, first published in 1983, which offers astute readings of such 'silver fork' specialists as Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, and Catherine Gore. With an assured eye for the social context of these works, Adburgham explores the class tensions and complex social interactions behind the high sheen of the silver fork.

'On A Balcony is devoted to the 14th century [B.C.] and the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, his sister-wife Nefertiti, the sculptor Tutmose, and the rivalry his religion of Aton brought to Egypt and its then current cult of Amon... presenting Ikhnaton's imposition of a new religion upon those who look on him as a god.' Kirkus Review'A fascinating study in royal neuroticism.' John Davenport, Observer 'A weird, subtle and compelling novel.' Time & Tide'What is important about Mr Stacton is his originality. We cannot guess how his book is going to develop. We cannot trace influences on his writing or fit him into any preconceived literary scheme...There is a self-confidence about his writing that has no trace of vanity.' Times Literary Supplement.

'Mary Lavin's stories... are subtle without making a palaver about it, beautifully told, no pat endings, no slickness; and as in life, nothing is resolved.' William TrevorFirst published in 1943, Tales from Bective Bridge is a collection of ten stories that memorably depict the rural mid-lands of Ireland and their people. Mary Lavin, though American-born, grew up in Athenry; and though the Irish short story was a dauntingly well-established form she succeeded in reinventing it with this, her debut collection, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which exhibits a Chekhovian gift for the meaning of small things, contrary behaviours and emotions. This 2012 edition, reissued for the centenary of Mary Lavin's birth, includes an introduction by Evelyn Conlon. 'One of modern Irish fiction's most subversive voices... [Lavin's] art explored often brutal tensions, disappointments and frustrations dictating the relationships within so-called 'normal' families.' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Prior to the First World War T.E. Hulme was one of the most original and striking creative personalities in England, strongly admired by both Pound and Eliot. Yet he died in 1917, virtually unknown. A key figure in the genesis of Modernism, Hulme mixed among a great range of gifted artists and was never shy of courting controversy. Unusually among poets of his generation, he was convinced of the rightness of Britain's role in the war (and criticised Bertrand Russell for his pacifism.) Robert Ferguson offers the first modern biography of Hulme, drawing upon access to Hulme's papers and later interviews with his associates.'A humane, comprehensive biography... By the end, Ferguson's final judgment of his subject - 'the conservative character at its best' - seems justified.' Jeremy Noel-Todd, Observer

'Essential reading... A horrifying account of the worst that human beings can do to each other. Neil Belton's synthesis of biography and history is masterly.' Anthony Storr, Sunday TimesHelen Bamber went to Belson in 1945 to work with survivors of the camp. She was just twenty. Since then her life has been involved with the worst side of the last half-century. In 1985, at the age of sixty, she set up an organisation devoted to helping victims of torture and to bearing witness against the fact of torture. This is her story. It is also a haunting unusual narrative of the post-war world. This 2012 edition offers a new introduction by the author.'The story of Bamber's life acts as a framework or prism through which some of the worst events of this century of horrors are addressed.' Times Literary Supplement'[Belton] writes beautifully about an ugly subject... with compassion but also with clarity.' Scotsman

'This book should be regarded as rescue work. It salvages from pre-Victorian periodicals from the limbo of forgotten publications, and exhumes from long undisturbed sources a curious collection of women who, at a time when it was considered humiliating for a gentlewoman to earn money, contrived to support themselves by writing, editing, or publishing... sometimes even supporting husbands and children as well...The women who emerge make a motley gallery; but over the years that I have been getting to know them, they have won my respectful affection. More, indeed. To me they are all heroines...'Alison Adburgham, from her ForewordMagazines addressed to women have a long history in English, and have been subject to condescension for just as long. Alison Adburgham's groundbreaking volume, first published in 1972, rescues the so-called 'scribbling female' from such scorn, not least by documenting just how hard was the struggle for women writers to live by the pen.

'A hilarious book of bad times, bedtimes and benders. It is a kind of cool parody of On the Road.' New StatesmanNo Particular Place to Go (first published in 1981) relates Hugo Williams's journey across the USA on a three-month poetry-reading tour wherein he also hoped to discover some of the America he had imagined for so long on the strength of its all-consuming popular culture.'No Particular Place to Go isn't a book that you'd take on a visitor's itinerary of the States . . . But the journey it describes is a potent one . . . It offered a poet's eye on modern culture, a cool, sideways perspective on its consumers and an enviable traveller's voice - not just unafraid of meeting the locals but positively keen to jump in and grab whatever was on offer.' John Walsh, Independent

'Owls call now in the hazy afternoon, and curlews get up in the night and join their voices with the plovers' lost cries. Small birds, distracted by the fury of mating, fly hedge-high in flight and pursuit and brush past one's ear, indifferent to human presence.There is a common belief that when sight diminishes hearing is intensified - an observation made, I would say, by onlookers. I doubt whether I hear more acutely than before, but every trifle heard passes under expert scrutiny in some formerly idle workshop in my mind...' Elizabeth Clarke's The Darkening Green (first published in 1964) portrays the gradual loss of sight endured by a farmer's daughter, and bursts with lyrical observation of rural life. It was inspired by Clarke's personal experience of supporting her husband, a farmer near the Elan Valley in mid-Wales, as his own vision began to fade.

'A book which goes on a special shelf in my library.' P.G. WodehouseWhat the Butler Saw (1962) is one of E.S. Turner's most pertinent and illuminating 'social histories', an exploration of the 'upstairs/downstairs' relationship across three centuries of English life. Drawing on literature, contemporary accounts and household manuals, Turner describes in fascinating detail how it came to be that the upper classes felt a need for an ever larger household staff, engaged in every imaginable form of drudgery; and, accordingly, how those in service - from high to low, butler to footman, housemaid to au pair - had to give satisfaction to their masters and mistresses while also, on occasions, contending with physical blows, tantrums, and (in the cases of some unfortunate servant girls) threats to their virtue.

'I believe I shall be writing home about this trip for the rest of my life... years from now, still recollecting, like an old white hunter, shadowy images to an empty fireplace, far into the night...' All the Time in the World, a first work of prose by the poet Hugo Williams, was originally published in 1966 and commemorates Williams' effort at age 21 to 'travel the world': the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, Japan and Australia. Rich with striking and vivid perceptions of people and places and perilous forms of transport, the account also finds Williams acquiring precious life-experience, even as the setting moves from the self-evident 'poem' of India's landscape to barren, petrified Northern Australia. In Calcutta Williams looks up the great Satyajit Ray through the telephone book. In Thailand he meets a girl at a dance-hall, moves into her sunny flat, contemplates staying. But to England he will return, albeit by the most unexpectedly arduous leg of his amazing journey.

The journal of Benjamin Haydon was, Max Beerbohm reported to Siegfried Sassoon, the best diary Beerbohm had ever read. Harold Acton declared Haydon 'a more exciting figure than Ruskin.' H.H. Asquith compared him favourably with Rousseau, while Aldous Huxley declared that 'Never was anyone more clearly cut out to be an author.' Today Haydon's portraits and monumental historical paintings hang in almost all Britain's major collections. However in his own time (1786-1846) his reputation was less secure. Although an intimate of Wordsworth and Walter Scott, on friendly terms with lords and politicians, Haydon was also well acquainted with debtor's prison. Still he remained throughout a witty, brilliant diarist, vividly evidenced by this volume, expertly edited by John Jolliffe, which gathers opinions on everything from the Elgin Marbles and Turner's landscapes to Napoleon's digestion and Queen Victoria's complexion.