Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

'Christopher's house stood out on its cliff like stages of lunar madness. It was the night of the first storm, not of winter, but of that week before winter which is the last warning to all creatures to dig themselves in...' Christopher Barocco is a self-made man of considerable means who decrees the building of a house in his image, to be carved out of a wild and treacherous Californian hillside in the Sierra Nevada valleys. However, as those who are drawn into his grand design soon discover, Barocco is also a man with a shadowy past; and the house is not destined to be a place where he will find peace but, rather, a catalyst for passion, violence, and death. First published in 1956, The Self-Enchanted was David Stacton's third novel. 'A Gothic extravaganza... [Stacton] seems to participate with so much fervour in the fantasies he describes.' Times Literary Supplement

'The Sophomore by Barry Spacks is that rare beast: a clever, sophisticated novel that is very, very funny. It's like an American Lucky Jim - at once hilarious, shrewd and very true. A complete delight.' William Boyd Harry Zissel is 22 years old, a college sophomore who plans to be a major writer. He just can't seem to finish anything. Then his girlfriend Miriam announces she's pregnant. Harry fears he'll end up a married wage-slave, just like his old buddy Arthur Thompson. Leaving his apartment to get breakfast, Harry decides instead to hit the road. Can he live the American dream of 'starting afresh'? Or does he need to buck up, straighten out, do some work for a change...? The question is not for him alone in Barry Spacks' brilliant debut novel from 1968, reissued here with a new introductory Q&A with the author. 'No synopsis can do justice to Spacks's technical skill and comic inventiveness.' Saturday Review

On a cold Northern Californian evening, high on a cliff in the lagoon township of Bolinas, a woman is running, barefoot, toward her open convertible. Behind her in the dark is the forbidding summer house where her reclusive husband now lies dead. She will drive to San Francisco, there to break the news to her domineering mother, since she has nowhere else to go. A scandal is in the offing - and even if it can be averted, a horde of family secrets are about to hauled into light. First published in 1955, A Fox Inside was David Stacton's third novel. 'Mysterious and absorbing... as a mystery story with marked psychological perceptions this one grips and pleases.' V.S. Pritchett, Bookman 'The concentration of a Mauriac applied to the fringes of San Francisco.' Sunday Times 'A taut well-planned thriller.' Books and Bookmen

"e;The flames now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky."e;On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter this year. Is this a miraculous message from God, or a spectacular sign of climate change. Entomology expert, Ovid Byron, certainly believes it is the latter. He ropes in Dellarobia to help him decode the mystery of the monarch butterflies.Flight Behaviour has featured on the NY Times bestseller list and is Barbara Kingsolver's most accessible novel yet.

On April 2 1982 Argentine forces seized the British-dependent Falkland Islands. Within 48 hours a British task force was sailing for the South Atlantic. One in five Britons opposed this war; but Argentina's surrender 74 days later set Margaret Thatcher on course for her second election victory. Anthony Barnett's Iron Britannia, first published in 1982, turned down the din of war and diagnosed something rotten in the British state. This new edition offers a new extended preface by Barnett, addressing UK foreign policy post-Falklands; plus additional texts Barnett wrote at the time.'A furious, sometimes gleeful and often witty polemic against the decaying British political system which the conflict revealed.' Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books'Anthony Barnett makes a variety of telling points... Most tellingly of all, the concept he puts forward of 'Churchillism', the rhetoric of national unity which overrides party and class considerations.' Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Times Literary Supplement'Done with almost Swiftian vigour. I warmly recommend it.' John Fowles, Guardian

'I wanted to reveal the soil, milieu, or social sphere and situation, from which the contributions of Vienna to European civilisation have sprung... I hope it is not my incurable love for my native city which makes me believe that Vienna is still important in the world of today, through all that is alive in its past, present and future...' Ilsa Barea, from her Preface (1966)This fascinating, learned yet highly personal survey explores the legend of Vienna, from frontier fortress and melting pot to the culturally rich centrepiece of the Hapsburg Empire, through two world wars and the grave damage inflicted by Hitler.'A fascinating account, so rich in texture, a book in which history and landscape, personalities and politics and culture combine to produce a living picture.' C.V. Wedgwood'Neither the treacly legend, nor the acid anti-legend, but a delicate and scholarly panorama.' Arthur Koestler

Based on unrestricted access to private papers, Grand Dukes and Diamonds charts the history of one of the most influential and extraordinary families of our time: the Wernhers of Luton Hoo.The family's fortune was made by Sir Julius Wernher, financier, mining magnate, and one of the creators of modern South Africa. Luton Hoo, a country house in Bedfordshire, became the site of Wernher's magnificent collection and was duly inherited by Sir Harold Wernher and his wife Lady Zia, daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia and a direct descendant of Pushkin. At Luton Hoo the couple displayed her priceless collection of Faberg,, and together they ran a racing stud at Newmarket. Three of their racehorses, Brown Jack, Meld and Charlottown, became legends in their time. Sir Harold also played a crucial role at D-Day, the story of which has its definitive telling within Raleigh Trevelyan's fascinating narrative.

'It is a salutary thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of 'grandmotherly' legislation...'Contemporary readers of a progressive bent may like to think it elementary that certain inhumane practices in which Britons indulged pre-1800 came to be abolished. But as E.S. Turner reveals, our history is littered with Colonel Blimp figures, of a mind that 'reforms are all right as long as they don't change anything.''Roads to Ruin still entertains and appals. It chronicles the disgraceful rearguard action of the upper classes against the introduction of the Plimsoll line, the abolition of child chimney sweeps and the repeal of laws under which convicted criminals could be hung, drawn and quartered...' Jonathan Sale, Guardian

By the early eighteenth century botanists were inching towards the shocking truth that plants had male and female organs and reproduced sexually. The first person to realize the practical implications of this was London nurseryman and author Thomas Fairchild. By transferring the pollen of a sweet William into the pistil of a carnation, he created a new plant that became known as 'Fairchild's Mule': the first man-made hybrid in Europe. But this primitive form of genetic engineering aroused a scientific and religious furore.Michael Leapman offers fascinating and colourful detail about the life and times of Fairchild, a troubled, gentle soul whose pioneering work changed the course of horticulture and paved the way for the growth of gardening as a cultural obsession.'A beguiling perambulation around the Georgian nursery trade.' Sir Roy Strong, Daily Mail

The Chronicles of Jean Froissart (1337-1410) are universally acknowledged as the most vivid and faithful account of 14th century events and ideas. This medieval collector of intelligence travelled widely from Scotland and Wales to France, Italy and the Netherlands, conversing with gentlemen of rank everywhere and developing a tremendous skill for persuading those about him to divulge their secrets. These Chronicles offer an unrivalled picture of the age of chivalry, drawn by a contemporary, with a verve that recalls Chaucer. Fresh, vivid, immediate and laced with a certain disrespect for the Establishment, they tell of acts of gallantry, tournaments, feasts and wars that make for fascinating reading, abetted by John Jolliffe's translation that renders Froissart into highly accessible modem English.

'Well, Sergeant, here we go then', I said. 'Getting our chance at last of a good old crack at the Boche, eh...?'Ex-infantryman and reconnaissance officer, author and humorist Patrick Ryan is perhaps best remembered for this acerbically comic novel - first published in 1963 and quickly adapted into a 1967 feature film by Richard Lester, starring Michael Crawford and John Lennon. It is a satirical 'memoir' of the misadventures of the haphazard and notably na,ve Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody and his fellow fighting men of Twelve Platoon - Sergeant Transom, Corporals Hink, Globe and Dooley, Private Drogue et al - as they stumble ill-preparedly into the theatres of World War Two.

Epic and engrossing, this extravagant true story covers 200 years in the life of an English family dynasty in Sicily. Benjamin Ingham, possibly the greatest tycoon England has ever known, was attracted to Sicily from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire by the burgeoning trade in marsala wine. This is the story of the English Croesus, who made the money, and his beneficiaries, the Whitaker family, who spent it - intertwined with two hundred years of enthralling Sicilian history.'Most entertaining and readable.' Anthony Powell, Telegraph'Deeply researched and wholly fascinating.' Washington Post'An original and entertaining contribution to Anglo-Italian history.' Times

The four Hanoverian King Georges may have become fixed in history as 'faintly absurd, certainly unattractive, figures' but in this colourful account of their lives and times, families and courts, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson restores a sprinkling of credit where it has been due. His account does not neglect the marital discords of George I, the towering paternal disdain of George II or the tragically misunderstood 'madness' of George III. But the reader is also encouraged to consider how the Hanoverian monarchs reacted to the climate of art and fashion in their times, from George II's espousal of Handel to George IV's patronage of Beau Brummell. By its own admission not a comprehensive history, Blood Royal is nevertheless an elegant and shining string of linked vignettes and short studies.

Ian Hamilton's last book, published posthumously in 2002, is a typically brilliant revisiting of the concept of Samuel Johnson's classic Lives of the English Poets, wherein Hamilton considers 45 deceased poets of the twentieth century, offering his personal estimation of what claims they will have on posterity and 'against oblivion.' Examples of each poet's verse accompany Hamilton's text, making the book both a provocative primer and a kind of critical anthology. 'The affective power of this book... lies in its understatement and its understanding of what we might care about. From a century of Manifestoes and Movements, Hamilton works as a corrective for the local and particular... his idea of poetry, of what made greatness in poetry, emerges intact from each measured sentence. His criticism always pointed you towards all that he could find that was true in a piece of writing.' Tim Adams, Observer

'Already hailed as a Cold War classic.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent Books of the Year 'Utterly absorbing, funny and humane. A romp through a twisted century in the heart of Europe.' Anna Funder, author of StasilandInternational bestseller and Winner of the German Book PrizeA sweeping story of one family over four generations in East Germany: the intertwining of love, life and politics under the GDR regime.

'A brilliant and scholarly biography of an extraordinary figure.' Lord Blake, Country Life'A fresh, engaging, conscientious account of one of the great Victorians.' Michael Foot, London Review of Books'A thorough and convincing account of 'the sage''. Peter Ackroyd, Times Thomas Carlyle was the most influential man of letters of his day, and his vivid account of the French Revolution remains one of the classic histories. Even George Eliot, no admirer, wrote: 'It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence; if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttes on his funeral pyre, it would only be like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest.'Simon Heffer draws upon previously unavailable papers to reassess a magnificent, defiant and often lonely individualist whose idiosyncratic and passionate books brought him universal fame.

'This handsomely produced and interestingly illustrated volume is two works in one. The first part offers a survey of Jewish history and literature. The second part presents what the preface describes as 'a thematic analysis of the teachings and practices of Judaism.'' Israel Finestein, Jewish Chronicle 'Fluently written, with an admirable fair-mindedness in surveying both history and belief.' A.J. Shermann, Times Literary Supplement 'The intelligent non-expert gets a clear picture of Jewish life, letters and history and it will be an endlessly useful reference book.' Julia Neuberger, Times Educational Supplement 'A wide-ranging account of things Jewish that one can truly recommend to intellectually curious Gentiles, as well as to the majority of modern secularized Jews who know relatively little about their complex tradition.' Louis Marcus, Irish Times

E.S. Turner's first book, published in 1948, is a wholly original, richly researched and uncommonly insightful study of a somewhat disreputable genre: the 'Boys' Weekly' papers commonly known as 'penny dreadfuls.''A classic of its kind... [Turner] ploughed through back numbers of the old blood-and-thunder adventure magazines specialising in cliffhanger serials; the young hero would be left hanging over a cliff in a totally impossible situation, which would be easily resolved in the next issue: 'With one bound Jack was free.' Social history had never been as much fun or, with three extra printings in its first week - such was the demand - as profitable.' Jonathan Sale, Guardian 'Some people felt that E.S. Turner may have invented a new kind of book - the popular social history, very British, very funny, but written with a glistening elegance.'Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books

The common perception of Britain's Victorian era as one of strict and strait-laced conformity has long been subject to rebuttal, and Robert Bernard Martin's Enter Rumour (1962) was an early and distinguished endeavour in this line. Herein Martin weighs the evidence of four scandalous incidents that aroused great public interest during the first dozen years of Victoria's reign, each of them emanating from 'what the Victorians might have called the higher orders of society.' Martin recounts the sorry tale of Lady Flora Hastings, victim of Court gossip; Lord Eglinton, who tried and failed to revive the medieval tournament; the strange case of the St Cross Hospital Charity; and George Hudson, 'Railway King', whose rise and fall remains a story for our times. Martin examines sources expertly and further explores how three of these scandals were transformed into fiction - by none less than Dickens, Disraeli and Trollope.

'There have been large magazines with tiny circulations and there have been diminutive sheets which have reached thousands of readers. But all 'little magazines' have been small in one or another of these ways, and usually in both... And yet most of them have had arrestingly large-scale ambitions...' From Ian Hamilton (1938-2001), himself the founder of the Review and New Review, comes this matchless survey (first published in 1976) of the literary magazine from 1912-1950: concentrating on those periodicals that enjoyed dominant editorial personalities (the likes of Pound, Eliot, Cyril Connolly) and which, ultimately, proved central to their cultural epoch. 'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force. He helped to shape our generation and at this rate may well do the same for the next as well.' Clive James

On its appearance in 1952 the Times Literary Supplement called Hemlock and After 'a novel of remarkable power and literary skill which deserves to be judged by the highest standards'. Angus Wilson's first novel is concerned with the hypocrisies of middle-class society. The protagonist, Bernard Sands, is a novelist and an intellectual who tries to found a centre for young writers. However, Sands is a secret homosexual and in the post-war Britain of the time his liberal ideas cause much anxiety to those in charge. Surrounded by false friends and scheming enemies Sands has to come to terms with his emotions and is forced to decide where his loyalties lie.A compassionately written novel Hemlock and After explores the conflict of duty and love in one man's life and the consequences of our choices. Written at a time when homosexuality was still an offence Hemlock and After is a brilliantly handled novel from a writer who was described by John Betjeman as 'mercilessly accurate and never dull.'

Mr Tasker's Gods was T. F. Powys's first novel. Written during the First World War it wasn't published until 1925. It is an unsettling work constantly showing the brutal reality behind the facades. Mr Tasker himself, on the surface, a respectable farmer and God abiding churchwarden is, in fact, 'a brute beast of the most foul nature' Many of the initial reviews were hostile, but that was largely because of the author's treatment of the church. It is under constant attack with the services being described as 'a sort of roll-call to enable authority to retain a proper hold upon the people'. Faber Finds are reissuing six works by T. F. Powys: Mr Tasker's Gods, Mark Only, Mockery Gap, Innocent Birds, Fables and God's Eyes A-Twinkle.

But for Swallows and Amazons, some of Arthur Ransome's earlier writings would be better known. The extraordinary success Ransome achieved as a children's writer, from the 1930's until his death in 1967, perhaps inevitably eclipsed his earlier work, but in the case of his two books and pamphlet on the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the tumultuous events that followed that is a great loss: it can be said unequivocally that these writings are on a par, perhaps even exceeding, such classics as John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World.Arthur Ransome knew Russia. He lived there from 1914 to 1918 almost all the time. He taught himself Russian and became a foreign correspondent for the liberal Daily News and Manchester Guardian. More than that, he came to know many of the Bolshevik leaders like Lenin, Trotsky and Checherin almost as personal friends, and, indeed, married Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. Arthur Ransome as a commentator on the Russian scene at the most convulsive moment in its history is unique. Unlike famous visitors like H. G. Wells (though his marvellous book, Russia in the Shadows shouldn't be overlooked) and Bertrand Russell, his was no brief journalistic inspection: and unlike other reporters such as John Reed, Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer there was no tendentiousness in what he wrote - they were convinced revolutionaries, Ransome, although not unsympathetic to the Bolshevik cause, was a more objective recorder.Six Weeks in Russia, The Crisis in Russia and the pamphlet, The Truth about Russia constitute the best contemporary writing about Russia at the time of the Bolshevik takeover. They were reissued in the early 1990s, with an introduction by Paul Foot which has been retained for the Faber Finds reissue of Six Weeks in Russia; otherwise they have been out of print since first published

There was no more appropriate person to write this book. Robert Blake was the doyen of Tory historians being most famous for his unsurpassed biography of Disraeli (to be reissued in Faber Finds). His history of the Conservative Party was first published in 1970. It then went as far as Churchill. A subsequent edition took it up to Thatcher and the final edition, the one being reissued by Faber Finds, to Major. For the span it covers, it remains the definitive one-volume history.'His consummate insight into the whole of the political scene, and his power to communicate the enjoyment of it, makes this exciting reading for anyone remotely interested in British political and social history, or even in the English character.' Sunday Times'This book is full of insights and enriched throughout by sparkling commentary' Evening Standard'An up-to-date history of the Party was wanted. Mr Blake supplies it with lucidity, scholarship and serene worldliness' Guardian

J. D. Bernal's monumental work, Science in History, was the first full attempt to analyse the reciprocal relations of science and society throughout history, from the perfection of the flint hand-axe to the hydrogen bomb. In this remarkable study he illustrates the impetus given to (and the limitations placed upon) discovery and invention by pastoral, agricultural, feudal, capitalist, and socialist systems, and conversely the ways in which science has altered economic, social, and political beliefs and practices. In this first volume Bernal discusses the nature and method of science before describing its emergence in the Stone Age, its full formation by the Greeks and its continuing growth (probably influenced from China) under Christendom and Islam in the Middle Ages. Andrew Brown, Bernal's biographer, with a nice sense of paradox, has said of him, he 'was steeped in history, in part because he was always thinking about the future.' He goes on to say, 'Science in History is an encyclopaedic, yet individual and colourful account of the emergence of science from pre-historic times. There is detailed coverage of the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Age and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. . . The writing flows and is devoid of the tortured idioms that mar so many academic histories of science. After reading it, it is easy to agree with C. P. Snow's orotund observation that Bernal was the last man to know science.Faber Finds are reissuing the illustrated four volume edition first published by Penguin in 1969. The four volumes are: Volume 1: The Emergence of Science, Volume 2: The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, Volume 3: The Natural Sciences in Our Time, Volume 4: The Social Sciences: Conclusion.'This stupendous work . . . is a magnificent synoptic view of the rise of science and its impact on society which leaves the reader awe-struck by Professor Bernal's encyclopaedic knowledge and historical sweep.' Times Literary Supplement

'They were hanged at dead of night on October 16 - hanged, that is with the exception of Goring. He, mocking to the end, took cyanide of potassium in his cell as the hour approached and was dead by the time the doctors were called. The finding of the board of inquiry that he had it all the time fit in well enough with the little ironical smile that we saw in the dock. For a day he made sport of Nuremberg, above all of American security and its year of pin-pricks. But Goring is dead and the others with him. It could hardly have been more sordid - the grimy prison gymnasium in which soldiers played their ball games, with its row of blazing lights, its three scaffolds, the ugly scrawled inscription on one of the wall ''V. D. walks the streets.'' Hollywood to the end. And one after another the monstrous leaders of the Third Reich fell with the name of the Fatherland on their lips. Have we after all created a grotesque legend?'This is how Robert Cooper's book ends. The book itself has the distinction of being the very first to have been published about the Nuremberg Trial. Its business was finished in October 1946: this book was published in January 1947. Penguin was its publisher, and it is worth quoting from the original blurb, 'This popular but full account of the epoch-making trial of the War criminals at Nuremberg, specially written for Penguin Books by The Times special correspondent who covered the process, is intended as a permanent summary and record of the first attempt to bring to justice the authors and begetters of international crime against humanity.'The author admits to there being 'many gaps and other deficiencies in this necessarily hurried summary of the Nuremberg Trial' and pleads with History to bring about a perspective, but it is the very immediacy of the account that makes it so compelling and still worth reading.

First published in 1989 Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press, and Me is the story of how this small publishing company became a chapter in literary history when, in 1955, the then novice publishers, of which Jean Hartley was one, were entrusted with the manuscript of Larkin's The Less Deceived. The Less Deceived, Larkin's second collection, contained the mature Philip Larkin style - that of a detached observer of what Jean Hartley referred to as 'ordinary people doing ordinary things' - the virtues of which came to be associated with The Movement, the post-war generation of poets that used plain language and traditional forms to address everyday life in Britain. The themes of The Less Deceived resonated with readers and it became one of the most outstanding collections of 1955. Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press, and Me charts that progress and introduces the reader to the real Philip Larkin. 'Jean Hartley's story is a vital piece of evidence for anyone curious about Larkin's life.' Andrew Motion, Observer.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known to her family as 'Sisi', belongs to a famous love story of European royalty. In 1853 the Emperor Franz Josef, the most eligible bachelor in Europe, fell in love with her at first sight when she was 15. They were married the next year. On the surface, it was a fairy-tale marriage, all the more poignant, with hindsight, because her tragic death augured the twilight years of the Habsburg Empire.First published in 1988, Brigitte Hamann's definitive biography tells Elisabeth's story from her birth into Bavarian nobility to her assassination at the hands of an Italian anarchist. In her lifetime she was idolised solely for her grace and beauty; but Hamann shows us a stronger character, bitter at her marriage, seeking independence, and struggling against the powerful influence of her mother-in-law, the Archduchess Sophie.

First published in 1966, Robert Blake's biography of Disraeli is one of the supreme political biographies of the last hundred years.An outsider, a nationalist, a European, a Romantic and a Tory - Disraeli's story is an extraordinary one. Born in 1804, the grandson of an immigrant Italian Jew, he became leader of the Conservative Party and was twice Prime Minister. Famous for the 1867 Reform Act, his purchasing of the Suez Canal and his diplomatic triumphs at the Congress of Berlin, he was also the creator of the political novel and, in Sybil, wrote the major 'Condition of England' work of fiction.'An outstandingly successful biography . . . Disraeli has never been brought so vividly to life.' Sir Philip Magnus, Daily Telegraph'A huge, scholarly and remarkably readable work which makes us revise vast tracts of our assumptions about nineteenth-century politics.' Sir Michael Howard, Sunday Times'A book that people will still be reading in fifty years' time and long after.' Times Literary Supplement

If ever a book had an unusual genesis. It belongs to that hybrid category 'faction', but the choice wasn't a literary contrivance, it was dictated by life-threatening circumstances. In the author's own words:'I know what will happen to me if I fall into the hands of the Nazis with these records. I didn't write at all this week. I came to close to burning everything. The difficulties just seemed too great. I have been trying to find another place to live where I can write, but it would have to be with comrades, and they are just as involved in underground work as I am. There could be a sudden a house search at their homes too. The place where I keep the written page is not absolutely safe either. But during this last week when I didn't write I couldn't find inner peace either. I was weighed down by a spiritual urgency that has compelled me to go on writing now. I must write all this down! We must manage to get this manuscript abroad. It must help to shake people's consciences awake.'Our Street is an account of left-wing resistance to Nazism in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin between January 1933 and June 1934, in other words, from just before Hitler became Chancellor to the early days of Nazi government. The street in question is Wallstrasse. It suffered particular brutality in revenge for the killing of a Stormtrooper. At the beginning of the book the names of eighteen victims are printed, 'The Charlottenburg Death List'. These names are real but they don't tell the whole story. As the translator, Betty Rensen, says in her foreword, 'But many more murders and executions have taken place: they could not all be recounted here, because of the possible repercussions on relatives and friends. The author had, therefore, to be content with the names in the death-list. These names are all well known in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and in some cases the families have emigrated beyond the reach of Nazi ''justice''.'The story of how the manuscript was smuggled out of the country is almost one of tragi-comedy. The author dressed as if going for a ski-ing holiday. The customs examination was thorough until, that is, it came to checking the rucksack. It appeared to contain two enormous cakes. Feigning embarrassment, Jan Petersen, explained, 'Well, you know what women are, don't you? I told my wife I was only going away for three days, but she would go and bake me two whopping big cakes. It'll take me a week to eat one. Just look at the size of them.' The official was all smiling complaisance, his wife being just the same, he said. Inside the cakes the manuscript had been baked!The English translation of Our Street was published in 1938 in Gollancz's Left Book Club. Victor Gollancz himself called it 'vivid and exciting'. It still is.