When Cosmo Landesman's American parents decided to move their young family to London in the swinging sixties, it was not to pursue a quieter life on this side of the pond. Quite the reverse: it was out of unbridled, unashamed lust for fame and fortune. But things did not go according to plan, and as a child Cosmo found himself charged with raising his starstruck parents and trying to cope with the publicity stunt of their 'open marriage'. Over the years he wrote press releases, blurbs and proposals for their plays, film treatments, novels, book ideas and demo tapes. He found himself playing the roll of creative midwife, personal manager, publicist, psychoanalyst and apologist. Not any more. In this hilarious memoir he finally lays bare his extraordinary childhood and the twists and turns of his parents' bizarre desire for the spotlight - and how they were always doomed to failure.

The private letters of a statesman are always inviting material for historians and when he has claim to literary fame as well the correspondence assumes a double significance. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) belonged to an age that gave pride of place to the written word as an instrument of both business and pleasure. This volume includes 363 letters (many previously unpublished) from his school boy days to his establishment in the Tory camp under the patronage of Lord Lyndhurst. Most prominent are Disraeli's letters to his sister, Sarah, with whom he corresponded frequently over several decades. To her he confided his hopes, interspersed with his observations and descriptions of social, literary and political events. The letters to Sarah supply a skeleton around which Disraeli's young manhood can be reconstructed and shed valuable light on the remaining documents in the volume. The correspondence also includes accounts of his tour of the Low Countries and the Rhine in 1824, his adventurous trip to Spain, Greece, the Near East and Egypt in 1830, his tense negotiations with publishers and his campaign to shine as a member of aristocratic society and win political patronage. The letters demonstrate the fine eye for detail and the capacity for self-dramatization and literary conceits which mark his novels. With their annotations they also provide a remarkably detailed account of life in the upper reaches of English society as viewed from below, and of Disraeli's ambitions to enter that life.

Originally published in 1983 and now reissued, a portrayal of middle-class Englishwomen in the interwar period which draws on the work of such novelists as May Sinclair, Rosamond Lehmann and Rebecca West.

Jack Stack is an editor with the full-blown tabloid virus. He says 'bollocks' a lot and his headline signature is a 'double ejaculation mark'. He revels in Fleet Street's non-stop silly season of hunting down young royals and petrifying cabinet members. He even outsmarts the Palace, Prime Minister and proprietor to win a knighthood for 'services to journalism' at the hand of the sovereign whose family he has comprehensively shafted. Jack takes over the beleaguered Mercury and within a day transforms the formerly respectable newspaper into the most tabloid of all tabloids. His cut-the-crap management style has the old guard trembling in its boots, but has he met his match in the domineering Marina Marshall - the chairman's mistress and the most canny columnist in Fleet Street? Perfect for an era obsessed with celebrity and spin, The Silly Season is a beautifully crafted, laugh-out-loud, satirical novel. Written by an insider who has seen it all, Bernard Shrimsley has drawn on his vast experiences. Bernard Shrimsley has been Editor of the Sun, News of the World and Mail on Sunday. He also edited the Daily Mirror in Manchester and the Daily Post in Liverpool, and helped edit both the Daily Express and Sunday Express. This is his third novel.

A remarkable insight into Jewish history in Britain, 'My Mother's House' is a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. The first novel from the acclaimed author of Eunice Fleet - a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. First novel from the acclaimed author of EUNICE FLEET a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine Simon is a troubled young manborn in Wales, of Jewish heritage, and in love with Englishness and an English heiress. He determines to reject his Jewish and Welsh identity and the industrial valleys he grew up in and seeks to fulfil his ambition to rise in the Civil Service. His experiences in love and his professional life see him reject Edith on discovering that she is not what he believed her to be, and taking up arms in the fight against Englands enemies in the Great War. Ultimately, he must embrace his family and his heritage before he can experience a sense of wholeness. Simons experience raises questions of belonging, language, nationhood and identity that are as relevant now as they were in 1931 when the novel was first published. Lily Tobiass sensitive individual and communal portraits illuminate some of the most topical personal, social and political issues of the twenty-first century.

The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent. Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a daunting range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, therefore, these essays consider “literary” and “factual” writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth. Contributors include Ian W. Archer, Eve Tavor Bannet, David Cressy, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Felicity Heal, Christopher Highley, John N. King, Mark Knights, Karen O’Brien, Paul Seaward, John Spurr, Andrew Starkie, Arthur H. Williamson, David Womersley, Daniel R. Woolf, and Blair Worden. Paulina Kewes is a fellow and tutor in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and a number of articles on Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century drama and politics. She has also edited a volume of essays, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), and is completing a book on the staging of history in Elizabethan England.

"The novel opens in 1945. Five Britons, shipwrecked on an island in the Far East in the early years of World War 2, listen to the general election results on their radio and learn that a Socialist government has been elected. They are rescued and return home by ship. While waiting to disembark at Southampton, James prays to God to "fix the election" and let him see "the England of all decent Conservatives' dreams." He hears a clap of thunder over his right shoulder and once on dry land, finds himself in a society designed entirely to suit people of his class. An entertaining satirical novel"--Review.

‘Why did we get into showbiz? One reason may have been the thought of working with beautiful show girls and meeting glamorous actresses'Mike Winters has been fortunate enough to have lived and worked part of his life in the same circles as a lot of famous people. But this was a far cry from when he was growing up in Tottenham, when his dream was to play rugby for England. Instead, Mike, with his brother Bernie, topped the bill at the London Palladium, and most of the major theatres in the UK. They had their own highly-successful TV series, running for 15 years, and were honoured with a Command Performance in front of the Queen and Prince Phillip. Little did Mike know that he'd later get to know her son. And Mike's view of this? ‘Stuff just happens.' In this fascinating, unpretentious account, Mike shares his precious memories and stories. They cover many years and involve an eclectic mix of stars and characters: Sean Connery, Cary Grant, Helen Mirren, Dusty Springfield, Jack Benny, mobster Meyer Lansky, Jimmy Tarbuck and The Beatles (who appeared on their show three times!), as well as sports personalities such as Don Revie, Matt Busby and Malcolm Allison, to name but a few. These were different days, when entertainers at all levels mixed together. Mike sung, danced, duetted, joked around with, did impressions of, or simply shot the breeze with, many talented men and woman in Variety and Television. Funny, charming and revealing, The Sunny Side of Winters is a heartfelt celebration of life, celebrity and brotherhood.Mike Winters has written four book, two novels, the authobiography of Angelo Dundee (with Angelo Dundee), and Axis of Greatness about Dundee, Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard (published by JR Books). He lives in Florida.