Download or read book Alms For Oblivion Volume I written by Simon Raven and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Cracking entertainment... Dangerously, deliciously addictive' Daily Telegraph '[Raven is] a freak writer, he defies classification. In wilder moments he suggests a loose, lunatic collaboration of Trollope, Ouida and Waugh' Observer Enter Alms for Oblivion, Simon Raven's dazzling cycle of ten novels, all telling separate stories but at the same time linked together by the characters they have in common: schoolboys and businessmen, writers and soldiers, prostitutes and patient wives, actresses and models. In the first four novels Raven's wayward band of upper-class anti-heroes lurch from debauched parties to rehearsals for nuclear war; from blackmail to murder; from marriage to adultery and back again. Volume 1: The Rich Pay Late, Friends in Low Places, The Sabre Squadron and Fielding Gray 'There are some people who consider the greatest cycle of twentieth-century novels to be Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These people are wrong. Widmerpool and his joyless accomplices are as nothing compared to the characters in Simon Raven's majestic, scurrilous and scabrous Alms for Oblivion cycle' Guardian

Download or read book Alms for Oblivion written by Peter Kemp and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-28 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asia, 1945. The War in Europe is over. Undeterred, the Japanese Empire fights on. With millions of loyal troops at its disposal and holdings that extend over thousands of miles, the Allies still have much intense fighting ahead. Freed from a Soviet dungeon by diplomatic happenstance as the European theatre closes is Peter Kemp. Kemp was a young law student who volunteered to fight for the Nationalists against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Recruited by the elite British Special Operations Executive for his extensive irregular warfare experience and enormous bravery, Kemp was a commando raider then spy in the Balkans and Poland before being betrayed, along with his comrades, by the advancing Red Army. Recognizing him as one of their best operatives, the British redeploy Kemp to the South Pacific. Although initially tasked with mopping up the Japanese remnants, after the surrender Kemp finds himself struggling to bring order to the chaos as anti-colonial sentiment surges, first in French Indochina and then the Dutch East Indies. With the United States indifferent or hostile to its allies' extended empires, Kemp is forced to lead Japanese troops and a smattering of European holdouts against a phantom army of guerrillas. Kemp published his story in 1961, one of only a few to offer a first-hand look at the little-explored aftermath of World War Two in the Pacific. The book has been out-of-print for decades, but joins Kemp's first two books, Mine Were of Trouble (recounting his Spanish Civil War experiences) and No Colours or Crest (following him through Europe in WW2) back in wide release again.

Download or read book The Rich Pay Late written by Simon Raven and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the lives of a group of upper and upper-middle class individuals in the mid-50s, on the eve of the Suez crisis.

Download or read book Fielding Gray written by Simon Raven and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Youngblood Hawke written by Herman Wouk and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 1192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A writer finds wealth, fame, and sorrow in midcentury Manhattan in “a tremendous novel . . . full of wisdom and pain” by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Los Angeles Times). Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man, moves from hardscrabble rural Kentucky to New York, hoping to make his mark on the literary world. His first novel becomes an instant hit, and he is toasted by critics and swept along on a tide of celebrity. But as Hawke gives himself over to the lush life that gilds artistic success—indulging in an affair with an older married woman and a flirtation with his editor, dabbling in real estate developments as his second novel brings him massive wealth and even bigger opportunities—he soon finds himself in a self-destructive downward spiral. Inspired by the life of Thomas Wolfe, and spanning from the Manhattan publishing world to Hollywood to Europe, Youngblood Hawke is both a riveting saga of postwar glamor and a poignant tale of one man’s rise and fall. “A big, powerful, exciting novel . . . Wouk has a tremendous narrative gift.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As searing and accurate a picture of New York in the late 1940s and 1950s as Bonfire of the Vanities was of its period. . . . And icing the cake are some marvelous Hollywood sections, including the best agent-in-action-on-two-telephones scenes ever captured in print.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book The World of Simon Raven written by Simon Raven and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he gained fame with his classic novel series, Alms for Oblivion, which chronicled the misdeeds of English society in the 1950s and 60s, Simon Raven is also recognized as a brilliant travel writer, an unblinking reporter of the seamier side of English upper-class life, and a hilarious commentator on the sexual mores of gay London. His demise in 2001 robbed English letters of one of its most colorful characters. Expelled from Charterhouse “for the usual thing,” he was, for a time, an officer in the British Army. He gambled heavily on the horses for years, was often in debt, drank too much, and had a rich and uncommonly varied sex life. He was said to possess “the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel,” and this selection of his writing contains a magnificent array of pieces on army life, sex, school days, and travel. The quality of his writing and his fearless descriptions of the habits of the English, and indeed of all mankind, will come as a revelation.

Download or read book Sound the Retreat written by Simon Raven and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Om engelske officerer iIndien lige efter 2. verdenskrig

Download or read book Brother Cain written by Simon Raven and published by House of Stratus. This book was released on 2008-01-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expelled from school, advised to leave university, and forced to resign from the army, Captain Jacinth Crewe has few options. He joins a sinister British Government security organisation. He trains in Rome and there is one final mission - to kill an American diplomat and his wife. The choice has to be made. And there is no turning back.

Download or read book Places where They Sing written by Simon Raven and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A short farce about the clash between Progressive and Traditional values in the UK, in 1967. The venue is Lancaster College, Cambridge, where a (seemingly) Communist agitator exploits a star student to disrupt and destroy its elitist environment."--Goodreads

Download or read book The Daemon Knows written by Harold Bloom and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWS Hailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now he turns at long last to his beloved writers of our national literature in an expansive and mesmerizing book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom’s most masterly book yet. Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers’ works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon”—the spark of genius or Orphic muse—in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors. As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon. Praise for The Daemon Knows “Enrapturing . . . radiant . . . intoxicating . . . Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “The capstone to a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching . . . The primary strength of The Daemon Knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. . . . Bloom’s books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground.”—The Washington Post “Audacious . . . The Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work.”—The Huffington Post “The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.”—John Ashbery “Mesmerizing.”—New York Journal of Books “Bloom is a formidable critic, an extravagant intellect.”—Chicago Tribune “As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom’s any more.”—The Guardian (U.K.)

Download or read book Bring Forth the Body written by Simon Raven and published by Blond & Briggs. This book was released on 1974 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume IX of the novel sequence Alms for Oblivion by Simon Raven, published in 1974. It was the ninth novel to be published in The Alms for Oblivion sequence and is also the ninth novel chronologically. The story takes place in England in 1972.

Download or read book Alms for Oblivion written by Pegram Dargan and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Roses Of Picardie written by Simon Raven and published by House of Stratus. This book was released on 2001-01-15 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A string of long-lost and cursed rubies gives the title to this highly imaginative tale. Jacquiz Helmut and Balbo Blakeney, among other eccentric characters, pursue the jewels across four countries and eight centuries. Horror, intrigue and high comedy shape the story as it races towards an unforgettable climax.

Download or read book The Sabre Squadron written by Simon Raven and published by Harvill Press. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ten Years at War written by Peter Kemp and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2020-12-06 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few men saw more of the world than Peter Kemp. Starting in 1936, when he was then only a Classics student pursuing a career in law, Kemp set out on a series of adventures through the most tumultuous period in human history. Leaving his comfortable life behind, Kemp volunteered to fight for Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. Seeing the fight as one against international communism, he was one of only a few British volunteers on that side of the much-misunderstood conflict. Kemp recorded his experiences in Mine Were of Trouble, offering an exciting and remarkably even-handed view of the war from the front lines. Kemp's next book, No Colours or Crest, picks up where the first left off. Recognized for his bravery and irregular warfare experience, Kemp was recruited by the elite British Special Operations Executive during the World War Two. After a stint with the doomed Small-Scale Raiding Force, carrying out commando raids on the Atlantic Coast, Kemp was tasked as a guerilla liaison in the Balkans and later Poland. Navigating a labyrinth of alliances and betrayals with the anti-Axis guerillas, Kemp witnessed the silent Soviet conquest of the "liberated" territories as the war in Europe drew to a close. The trilogy concludes with Alms for Oblivion, which sees Kemp reassigned to the South Pacific at the end of WW2 and its chaotic aftermath. Although initially parachuted in to fight the Japanese, Kemp soon found himself battling American- and Soviet-backed terrorists alongside local leaders, surrendered troops, and a smattering of European holdouts. Juggling the roles of soldier, smuggler, and spy, Kemp provides a rare look at this forgotten period of history. Collected into a single volume for the first time ever, these books have much to offer researchers and pleasure readers alike. Mystery Grove Publishing Company is proud to make the works of one of civilization's greatest unsung heroes accessable to the general public once again.

Download or read book The Fall Guy A Novel written by James Lasdun and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge. It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun’s acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet.

Download or read book Through Belgian Eyes written by Helen MacEwan and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlotte Brontes years in Belgium (184243) had a huge influence both on her life and her work. It was in Brussels that she not only honed her writing skills but fell in love and lived through the experiences that inspired two of her four novels: her first, The Professor, and her last and in many ways most interesting, Villette. Her feelings about Belgium are known from her novels and letters her love for her tutor Heger, her uncomplimentary remarks about Belgians, the powerful effect on her imagination of living abroad. But what about Belgian views of Charlotte Bronte? What has her legacy been in Brussels? How have Belgian commentators responded to her portrayal of their capital city and their society? Through Belgian Eyes explores a wide range of responses from across the Channel, from the hostile to the enthusiastic. In the process, it examines what The Professor and Villette tell Belgian readers about their capital in the 1840s and provides a wealth of detail on the Brussels background to the two novels. Unlike Paris and London, Brussels has inspired few outstanding works of literature. That makes Villette, considered by many to be Charlotte Brontes masterpiece, of particular interest as a portrait of the Belgian capital a decade after the country gained independence in 1830, and just before modernisation and expansion transformed the city out of all recognition from the villette (small town) that Charlotte knew. Her view of Brussels is contrasted with those of other foreign visitors and of the Belgians themselves. The story of Charlotte Brontes Brussels legacy provides a unique perspective on her personality and writing.