Mixing observations about friends and family with short sketches and literary gossip, this third installment of the author's notebooks updates an intriguing personal and cultural record. Starting where Rough Copy: Personal Terms II left off, the story of one contemporary writer's life is resumed in anecdotes, aphorisms, journal entries, reviews, and vignettes of people and places.

'Personal Terms IV' follows Raphael's distinguished and eventful career as a novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter, offering a wry take on the glamorous worlds of Hollywood and literary London during the second half of the 1970s.

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms , an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. "Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written," as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review , these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide acquaintance in the world of politics, literature, journalism and the movies gives him rare access to the character of those, in England and America, who dominated the times. The unintended result is a Proustian parade of people, famous and otherwise forgotten, and events momentous and strictly personal, presented by an unabashedly partisan, unblinking eye-witness. There is nothing else quite like this unfolding project in English or American literature. "I am not a camera, but--as these carnets prove--I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys."

This is the latest collation from Frederic Raphael's personal journals. Compulsively readable, wise, and mischievous by turns, this sixth volume chronicles his eventful life in the seemingly glamorous worlds of 1980s Hollywood and literary London.