Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 with the aim of researching the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. One of its best-loved publications is The Pub and the People (1943), a unique study of one of Britain's best-loved pastimes, describing how people behaved in pubs, what and how much they drank, and the decor and layout of the average pre-war alehouse. Alongside sociological interest it offers amusing insights into an era when supping pints was only for the roughest customers, and beer was considered helpful not only to general health ('There is no bad ale, so Grandma said') but also (contra the porter in Macbeth) to the act of love. 'The authors of this book have unearthed much curious information.' George Orwell, Listener'Anyone with an interest in the history of beer and pubs in Britain ought to read it.' Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog

Michael Foot's two-volume biography of Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britain's greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service, - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume I, first published in 1962, describes Bevan's life from his birth in Tredegar in the South Wales Valleys, through his abortive schooling, his employment at a colliery and the subsequent embrace of socialism that would make him a leader among South Wales miners. It follows his path to the House of Commons as a Labour MP with a fast-rising reputation as a defender of the working class; and his marriage in 1934 to fellow firebrand MP Jennie Lee. The volume closes with Labour's landslide election victory of 1945, and Bevan's appointment as Minister of Health.

'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.'So begins F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author's inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens' one 'completely serious work of art'; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting.'[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read... the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality.'Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond - Jack to his family, John in later life - was born in Birkenhead in 1902 and made his living as an advertising copywriter, but his true writing life was in poetry, three volumes of which he published in his lifetime: The Walls of Glass (1934), Voices in a Giant City (1947), and Selection (1958). Tessimond died in May 1962, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday, and it would fall to Hubert Nicholson, his friend and executor, to make a posthumous selection of his work including a number of uncollected and unpublished poems. Not Love Perhaps (1978) has at its heart the memorable title piece which contrasts the idea of romantic love 'that many waters cannot quench' with the notion of a mutual companionship that enables two people to 'walk more firmly through dark narrow places'.

'Donne is perhaps the most intellectual of English poets, and John Carey is perhaps the most intelligent of contemporary English literary critics. The encounter, as one might expect, is fierce and enthralling... This book is sensitive, searching, powerful, exciting, provocative and witty. It is a superb achievement.' Christopher Hill, TLSJohn Donne: Life, Mind and Art is a unique attempt to see Donne whole. Beginning with an account of his life, it takes as its domain not only the whole range of the poetry, but also the sermons, the letters, the spiritual and controversial works, and such highly personal documents as the treatise on suicide. The result is a clearer picture than has hitherto emerged of one of the most intricate and compelling of literary personalities.'The one book we have needed all along... A magnificent exercise in reappraisal. I have never read a critical work which reaches as deeply inside the mind of its subject.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times'Carey's book is itself alive with the kind of energy it attributes to Donne.' Christopher Ricks, London Review of Books

'I go in my bedroom and lie on my bed and soon as I set eyes on Nick it's like magic...' (Alison, 14)Starlust is a stunning oral history of pop music fandom in all its glorious, unexpurgated ecstasies and deliriums. Through first-hand accounts collected from interviews, diaries, letters and confessions Fred Vermorel presents an unprecedented, multi-faceted portrait of 1980s-era pop adoration and obsession - from lonely teens love-struck by Nick Heyward, to the androgynous disciples who claim psychic connections with David Bowie, to the housewife-devotees who share 'lashings of Manilust' for Barry Manilow. 'This book, at first glance full of the fantasies of maniacs, is really full of the wonderful dreams of people just like you and me.' Pete Townshend Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost/neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog https://faberfinds.wordpress.com/

Greg is overheard admitting that his girlfriend Steph is no beauty, but that he wouldn't change her for the world. She is devastated; he can't see what he's done wrong. Meanwhile, Greg's friend Kent alternates between boasting about how gorgeous his wife Carlyis and chasing after a hot new colleague.The final part of Neil LaBute's 'beauty trilogy' (following The Shape of Things and Fat Pig) about society's obsession with looks, Reasons to Be Pretty premiered in the UK at the Almeida Theatre, London, in November 2011.'[The Shape of Things] is LaBute's thesis on extreme feminine wiles, as well as a disquisition on how far an artist can go in the name of art . . . Like a chiropractor for the soul, LaBute is looking for realignment, listening for the crack.' Elle'A heart-warming tale from America's master misanthrope.' Independent on Fat Pig

'Barcelona is colour, noise, heat, dust, violent traffic and quick-moving people. Many of the men carry rifles slung on their backs...'Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a pioneer of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and commander of the British Battalion in the bloody Battle of Jarama in February 1937, at which he was wounded. English Captain is Wintringham's own startling account of his service to the cause of the Spanish republic.'[Wintringham] was a remarkable man of ideas; the foremost Marxist expert on warfare, a published poet, a brilliant propagandist... He was also a man of action who believed that few things in life could be achieved unless you were prepared to fight for them.' Hugh Purcell, History Today

'I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit...'Born in Belfast in 1875, Forrest Reid would earn a reputation as 'the first Ulster novelist of European stature.' He studied at Cambridge, but it was Belfast where Reid returned to make his home, and where his questing mind seemed to find all that it required of inspiration. As he writes in Apostate (1926), the first of two volumes of autobiography - 'The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'

By 1914 the Liberal Party had been governing Britain ever since its stunning general election victory of 1906. Four years later the Party was out of office, and so enfeebled it would never again form a government. What prompted the Liberal decline in the years of The Great War, and why did this decline then accelerate? Trevor Wilson's classic study analyses the strains exerted on Liberal principles by war, and the leadership crisis induced in 1916 by Lloyd George's ousting of Asquith.'A good political mystery, and Mr Wilson has told it in fine dramatic style.' A.J.P. Taylor'Offers portraits of those rivals, Asquith and Lloyd George, that are among the best - the most plausible and the most temperate - available.' New Yorker

'This is a fan's eye-view of Paul Gascoigne - and fans, as we know, are expert at reassembling dashed hopes...'In 1987 Ian Hamilton - acclaimed poet, biographer and Tottenham fan - was smitten from afar by the impish skills of Newcastle United's Paul Gascoigne. When 'Gazza' duly signed for Spurs, Hamilton was sure that he and English football had found their new hero. But Gascoigne was destined to be brought low by tragic flaws, and Hamilton was ideally positioned to tell the tale in this, a peerless piece of football literature.'By the final whistle Hamilton has sketched a compelling figure: reckless, cocky, twitchy, hyperactive and half bonkers... but with flashes of implausible grace that connect with the dreams of his audience.' Independent

'You can't imagine what it's like when your youth comes back - and beauty, and more... I found out that if I took the pills I could turn - just like that - into the person I had been. Yes, into me! Eliza! Where had I gone? Who had I been?'Emma Tennant's brilliant re-imagining of Robert Louis Stevenson tells of an impoverished single mother at the bitter end of her tether, who finds dark pharmaceutical means to revive her looks and career ambitions. This splitting of personality, however, leads to disintegration and murder.'Fascinating.' Financial Times'Brilliant... Wittily worked out, perceptive of modern mores and values.' Times Literary Supplement'Reminiscent of Muriel Spark at her very darkest and very best.' Scotland on Sunday

'...I met the sad menopausee and offered her, at the flick of a switch, a return of beauty, youth, and desire. And - after all, I'm no stinge-merchant - power and money as well. Why not? If a man, such as Dr Faustus, was offered such commodities by myself... why not a woman, in this age of equality?'Emma Tennant's ingenious modern-day reworking of the Faust legend describes a young woman's dark discovery of just what befell her kindly long-lost grandmother.'Brilliant'. Penelope Fitzgerald, Evening Standard'An elegant and bitter story... an angry diagnosis of consumerism, pollution, wealth, poverty and war...' Times Literary Supplement'It is a masterpiece. Or, as the Devil himself might say, one hell of a book.' Daily Mail

This, arguably Sylvia Townsend Warner's most luminous collection of stories, was first published in 1966 and includes 'A Love Match', hailed by the Los Angeles Times as 'a supreme example of her technique.' It is the tale of Celia and Justin Tizard, sister and war-scarred brother, whose uncommon closeness becomes the talk of a small English village.'Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most talented and well-respected British authors of the twentieth century. Today she is shamefully under-read. Her short stories have been particularly neglected - and yet, intelligent, lyrical, beautifully crafted, they constitute some of the very best of her work. It is wonderful to see so many of them being made available again by Faber Finds.' Sarah Waters

By mid-nineteenth century, Meyer Amschel Rothschild's five sons controlled one of the most massive fortunes in Europe. The Rothschild name had become synonymous with the enormous political and social power that often accompanied that wealth, the amassing of which is remarkable considering the painfully modest beginnings of its founder.Born in the unimaginable squalor of Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto (where he chose to spend his entire life), Meyer Rothschild established a small trading and banking business that - despite political, legal, and social constrictions segregating Jews from the outside world -evolved into an empire that included the financial centers of the world.Founder is the story of Meyer Rothschild's times, of the condition of the Jews, of the city-states before they were overrun by Napoleon's troops. It is about the threshold of the modern era, when the world of aristocrats and gentlemen was profoundly influenced by a shrewd, dedicated, loyal father and his family. Amos Elon's rich and evocative depiction of life in mid-eighteenth-century Europe provides a vivid background against which we come to understand and marvel at the strength and perseverance driving this obviously extraordinary, humble man. 'Elon... has written a terrifically readable biography that does more than illuminate the formerly shadowy figure who served princes in what is now Germany. Through the prism of Mayer Rothschild's life, Mr. Elon gives us a fascinating glimpse into how Europe - and by implication, the New World - made the journey from mercantilism to modern entrepreneurship....Mr. Elon's feat is in chronicling all this with clarity and drama. Founder skillfully weaves history into this story of human endeavour to create a memorable narrative of Mayer Rothschild's time.'Deborah Stead, New York Times Book Review

Elizabeth David was born into a upper-class family and pursued a rebellious and bohemian life as a student of art and then an actress in Paris, before running off with a married man to Greece and then settling in Cairo, where she worked for the British government. After the Second World War, she returned to England, where she was shocked by poor food into writing first articles, then books on Meditteranean cooking. A Book of Mediterranean Food was published in 1950, inspiring a cookery revolution, bringing new flavours and ingredients to the drab, post-war British diet. Over the next few years, David was to become a major influence on British cooking, yet her classic cookery books show little of the colourful personality behind the public persona. Artermis Cooper, in this refreshing biography, reveals an adventurous and uncompromising personality - a woman with a passion for food, life and men. This is the whole story: of her strong friendships, her failed marriage, tempestuous affairs and the greatest love of her life, told with extensive refererence to David's private papers and letters.'In this wonderful and creative book, Cooper has brought David to life... she not only writes like an angel, but has done her research with great skill and obvious enjoyment.' Derek Cooper, Sunday Times'Engagingly well-written, thoroughly researched and documented. One of the delights of Artemis Cooper's book is that it makes you go back, time and again, to the source. And suddenly I will find that I have whiled away the afternoon re-reading, for the sheer pleasure of it, half of Spices or An Omlette and a Glass of Wine.' Frances Bissell, The Times'Fluent, engaging and astonishingly readable.' Clarissa Dickson Wright, Mail on Sunday'Artemis Cooper is skilled and wise enough to handle the contradictory sides of David's character without being either censorious or sensational.' Arabella Boxer, The Times Literary Supplement

Writer of The Times Diary, Michael Leapman, became a tenant of an allotment next to Brixton Prison for 35p a year in 1974 when food and energy shortages inspired many people to attempt self-sufficiency. This book tells the story of the plot and the author's first year of cultivating it, written with humour and wit while providing a wealth of information for the would-be urban horticulturalist."e;It is splendid stuff and if your husband is a gardening bore and you want to shut him up for an hour or three, this is the answer.' The Guardian'It makes fine bedside reading, laced with plenty of anecdotes, good gardening information, plus an Idle Gardener's Almanac.' Good Housekeeping

Lady Diana Cooper was in her prime widely regarded as the most beautiful woman in England and the idol of her generation. She was witty, outrageous, generous and loyal. Famous as a member of the aristocratic and intellectual group 'The Cotorie', she later edited the magazine Femina before starting a career as an actress on the stage and then in films during the 1920s. Her husband, Duff Cooper, was parliament in 1924 and Diana continued as a society hostess until his retirement in 1947. Diana wrote three volumes of memoirs in the 1950s which are also published by Faber Finds, and she died in 1986 aged 93. Philip Ziegler's biography is a compulsive read, telling the story of a remarkable woman and her passionate life.'For nine decades a symbol of all that is dashing and daring, a synonym for courage and wit and inspired friendship.' Sunday Telegraph'Combines total honesty with total affection... A portrait which you can laugh over, cry over and think over as well.' Punch'No wonder Evelyn Waugh loved her.' Scotsman

'William Sansom [1912-1976] was once described as London's closest equivalent to Franz Kafka. He wrote in hallucinatory detail, bringing every image into pin-sharp focus... Sansom writes of head-aching hatreds and hopeless ecstasies, of malevolent objects and wasted lives... Sansom's publisher described his work as "e;modern fables"e;, but what makes them so ripe for rediscovery is their freshness and currency.' Christopher Fowler, Independent 'The worlds William Sansom surprises into life are populated with gentle stranglers and murderous lovers, with beasts that think like men and men who dream themselves into beasts. Their environs are often menacing and unfailingly strange...'Time This stunning collection, introduced by Elizabeth Bowen, offers a gleaming array of Sansom's finest fables, among them 'The Wall', 'A Contest of Ladies', 'Displaced Persons', 'Various Temptations', 'A Saving Grace', 'A Woman Seldom Found', and 'The Vertical Ladder.' ''The Vertical Ladder'... a short story about a man climbing a very high ladder and becoming more and more afraid... is a masterpiece, at once pure thought and pure action, [one] of the best short stories of the twentieth century.'B.R. Myers, Atlantic 'A Sansom story is a tour de force... Here is a writer whose faculties not only suit the short story but are suited by it - suited and, one may feel, enhanced... In the narration there must be an element of conjury, and of that William Sansom is an evident master.'Elizabeth Bowen (from her 'Introduction')

'Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.'John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity. 'In Martin, the unhappy and tormented genius has found the most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter... [The book] goes to the heart of Hopkins, and plants him firmly before us as a Victorian, and a great one.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Martin follows Hopkins through his toils with sympathy and a great unshowy command of the facts. In this magnificently solicitous biography he has re-established the contours of the story definitively and made the homosexual drama integral to the better-known drama of conversion and poetics.' Seamus Heaney, Independent on Sunday 'The triumph of this learned, scrupulously detailed and persuasive biography is that it brings the reader as near as it is perhaps possible to come to living Hopkins' life, to sensing the mysterious crushing pressures that were for him intimately bound up with the richness and complexity of his writing.'Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

Volume thirteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In September 1939, war with Germany casts its long shadow over the town and countryside. Phillip Maddison, now farming in East Anglia, still stubbornly believes that Hitler's chief aim is the defence of Europe against Stalin; but he is engaged in a personal war on the 'bad lands' where his farm is situated, trying to subdue mounting debts and to create a fertile yeoman holding for his family. The portrayal of his struggles, both with himself and with the land, carry total conviction, as does the picture of his life in England until the ending of the Battle of Britain.'This astonishing sequence. It is a major mark he is making on the modern novel.' Daily Express

Volume fourteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Beginning in the winter of 1940/1 and ending with the uneasy 'sunrise' of peace in 1945, this volume sees Phillip Maddison striving idealistically to hold a balance while lamenting the division and possible total ruin of Europe, as he copes with the day-to-day problems of running the East Anglian farm he has wrested from virtual wilderness. The pattern of everyday living in those years is lovingly evoked: the bomber-haunted nights, the petty profiteering and gossip of country life - all essential, but often unrecorded, elements of the wartime scene.'The sequence will stand, at the end, as a massive emotional record.' Guardian

The final volume, volume fifteen, of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Phillip Maddison is living apart from his wife, Lucy, in the year immediately following the Second World War. He has sold his farm and handed over the proceeds in trust for the family excluding himself. Now living alone on Exmoor he is as ever haunted by the past, and his pro-German views bring him under constant fear of attack. A love affair, the death of his father, and tender relationship with his cousin's two daughters are particularly outstanding in a novel full of incident; and this final novel in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight completes the history of Phillip Maddison while at the same time rounding off an unsurpassed picture of fifty swiftly-changing years.

Norman Gash's magnificent two-volume life of Sir Robert Peel - Mr Secretary Peel (1961) and Sir Robert Peel (1972) - is the standard work on the great statesman, and is widely considered one of the great biographies of nineteenth-century prime ministers. Faber Finds is delighted to return both to print. In this second volume, Gash focuses on the years between 1830 and 1850, the height of Peel's political career, which included his two terms as prime minister, the controversial repeal of the Corn Laws, and his reform of the Conservative Party. 'In ... his masterly biography, covering Peel's career from the Reform Crisis to his untimely death in 1850, Professor Gash shows himself not merely an admirer but an emulator - brilliant intellect, master of detail, man of conservative but humane conscience.' Harold Perkin, Guardian 'Norman Gash's Sir Robert Peel shows how high and austere academic writing about a major figure is compatible with an outstanding general biography.' Roy Jenkins, Observer 'In Mr Secretary Peel, the first volume of this biography, he provided a rich and perceptive portrait of a statesman in the making. Now at last he has completed one of the great biographies of our time.' Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph 'Sir Robert Peel by Norman Gash ranks with the great political biographies of the past, a classic work in both scholarship and presentation.' A. J. P. Taylor, New Statesman

'It is not our struggle to be happy that is mistaken; it is our false idea that we can find happiness anywhere but in ourselves... happiness does not depend on outward things. It is born of the mind, it is nourished by the mind, it is what rises, like breath in a frosty air, from the mind's wrestling with its fate...'The Art of Happiness (first published in 1935) belongs to John Cowper Powys's sequence of philosophical writings, and finds him exploring the problem of how man lives with his fellow man, and also with woman - that is to say, here, as opposed to the abstract arguments concerning Man in the universe, Powys is concerned with the practical arguments such as arise between man and his neighbour, his wife, his lover - and also with man's arguments against himself, all in the pursuit of happiness. The careful reader will find herein hints, clues, intimations, as to how we all might become a little happier - an invitation few of us would feel so fortunate as to refuse.

Like Charles II, the sick man of Europe was 'an unconscionable time dying.' Time and time again from the seventeenth century observers predicted the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, yet it outlived all its rivals. As late as 1910 it straddled three continents. Unlike the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns or Habsburgs, the House of Osman was still recognised as an imperial dynasty during the peacemaking which followed the First World War.This book offers a fascinating overview of the Ottoman Empire's decline from the failure to take Vienna in 1683 to the abolition of the Sultanate in 1922 by Mustafa Kemal, after a revolutionary upsurge of Turkish national pride. It deals with constantly recurring problems: competing secular and religious authority; acceptance or rejection of Western ideas; greedy neighbours; population movements; and the strength or weakness of successive Sultans. The book also emphasises the challenges of the early twentieth century, when railways and oilfields gave new importance to Ottoman lands in the Middle East. Recent events have put the problems that faced the later Sultans back upon the world agenda. Names like Basra and Mosul again make the headlines. So, too, do the old empire's outposts in Albania and Macedonia in the west and the mountainous Caucasus in the east. Alan Palmer's narrative reminds us of the long, sad continuity of conflict in the Lebanon. We read of the Kurdish struggle for survival, of Armenian aspirations for independence, of the lingering interests of the Ottomans in their Libyan provinces, and of the Muslim character of Sarajevo in the troubled country that was once Yugoslavia. The Ottoman past has great relevance to the changing patterns of eastern Europe and western Asia in the twentieth century.

Volume eleven of The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Twelve hundred acres of downland valley with a trout stream await an heir and Sir Hilary Maddison wants his only nephew Phillip to learn farming the hard way, beginning as a labourer and rising to a tenancy-for-life. But Phillip has other ideas. Unable to forget the early death of his wife Barley as well as his friends who died in the Great War, he needs to recreate his past in his writing. Trying to combine both worlds Phillip is bound to fail in one of them; and literary success only intensifies the dilemma. 'The finest yet in Mr Williamson's long series' Kenneth Allsop

Volume twelve of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In this novel of the troubled and decadent years before the Second World War, Phillip Maddison sees the survivors of the Western Front as a phoenix generation impelled to reject the past in order to make a country 'fit for heroes'. Yet he remains aloof from any direct action, preferring to plan his own history of the Great War and its aftermath while becoming deeply involved in his own problems. Looking meanwhile over the international scene, as the storm clouds of war gather inexorably, the Faust-like figure of Hitler is preaching the advent of a new Europe, based on a thousand years of peace.'He commands, and is able to turn to artistic ends, a powerful and mournful sense of the near past which has shaped and distorted us into what we are.' Normal Shrapnel, Guardian

Mockery Gap is the story of a tiny village on the coast of England, and a series of events arising out of the complex currents set flowing in this simple community by the chance remarks of a chance visitor. This is Mr James Tarr, a gentleman of ethnological pursuits with a desire to impress himself firmly upon people. He exercises this passion on the inhabitants of Mockery Gap, and the effect of carefully-weighted suggestion upon minds given to credulity and superstition makes for far-reaching and devastating consequences."e;By all conventional standards, T F Powys is the least modern of writers. His novels and short stories are set in a landscape as far removed as possible from anything smart or urban - a fantastical version of English village life, in which human emotions work themselves out against a backdrop of brooding countryside... Writing as an allegorist or fabulist rather than any sort of conventional realist, Theodore Powys looks not to the present or the future, but to the past. He sets his tales in a grotesquely exaggerated rural landscape, not because he has any nostalgia for the way of life it may once have contained, but because, by doing so, he is free to strip human beings down to their barest elements - their lust, greed, cruelty and stupidity, and the mixture of dread and yearning with which they respond to the prospect of death."e; John Gray, New Statesman

'A village is like a stage that retains the same scenery throughout all the acts of the play. The actors come and go, and walk to and fro, with gestures that their passions fair or foul use them to... A country village has a way now and again of clearing out all its inhabitants in one rush, as though it were grown tired of that particular combination of human destinies, and shakes itself free of them as a tree might do of unwelcome leaves..'The action of T.F. Powys' blackly absorbing, deeply characteristic Innocent Birds unfolds in the English croft of Madder, an ostensibly sleepy and settled milieu where the local people, nonetheless, are prone to acting on impulses and urges that have the power to bring themselves (and others) to ruin. 'There is Mr. Bugby, who buys "e;The Silent Woman"e; because of the sinister coincidence that successive keepers of that tavern were speedily widowed. There is Maud Chick, an imbecile girl longing to have a baby, whom Mr. Bugby avoids after one experience; and Polly Wimple, prim Miss Pettifer's maid whom he does not avoid, to her great cost. A cormorant, far from the sea, that flaps and roosts arbitrarily at dusk whenever anything especially morbid or malicious is about to take place, is an apt metaphor for a shadowy flight of the author's imagination...'Time, June 1926