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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Face Pressed Against a Window written by Tim Waterstone and published by . This book was released on 2019-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An evocative and candid memoir that charts the key moments in the life of Britain's most successful bookseller.

Download or read book The Captain written by Michael Barber and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2001-07-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Raven once described himself as too intelligent not to be a rotter, precisely the sort of quip that has made him a thorn in the side of the establishment. Expelled from school, he withdrew from Cambridge and was lucky not to be drummed out of his regiment for conduct unbecoming. Kind friends proffered whiskey and revolver, but like Evelyn Waugh's Captain Grimes, he declined to do the decent thing. Instead he pulled himself together and became a writer, the one profession from which no degree whatever of moral or social disgrace could debar him. From these inauspicious beginnings he has developed into one of Britain's most successful writers, with over 20 novels to his credit, many short stories and pieces of journalism, and television screenplays such as Edward and Mrs. Simpson and the Palliser novels.

Download or read book Mine Were of Trouble written by Peter Kemp and published by . This book was released on 2022-03-14 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spanish Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil Española). Escalating violence between left- and right-wing political factions boils over. Military officers stage a coup against a democratically elected, Soviet-backed, government. The country is thrown into chaos as centuries-old tensions return to the forefront. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards choose sides and engage in the most devastating combat since the First World War. For loyalists to the Republic, the fight is seen as one for equality and their idea of progress. For the rebels, the struggle is a preemptive strike by tradition against an attempted communist takeover. Thousands of foreigners, too, join the struggle. Most fight with the Soviet-sponsored International Brigades or other militias aligned with the loyalist "Republicans". Only a few side with the rebel "Nationalists". One of these rare volunteers for the Nationalists was Peter Kemp, a young British law student. Kemp, despite having little training or command of the Spanish language, was moved by the Nationalist struggle against international Communism. Using forged documents, he sneaked into Spain and joined a traditionalist militia, the Requetés, with which he saw intense fighting. Later, he volunteered to join the legendary and ruthless Spanish Foreign Legion, where he distinguished himself with heroism. Because of this bravery, he was one of the few foreign volunteers granted a private audience with Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Kemp published his story... one of the only English accounts of the war from the Nationalist perspective, after a prestigious military career with the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War.

Download or read book Lord of Strange Deaths written by Phil Baker and published by Strange Attractor Press. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forever associated with his creation of evil genius Dr Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer (1883-1959) was the king of pulp exotica. At the height of his fame he was one of the most popular writers on the planet. Lord of Strange Deaths is the first attempt to do justice to Rohmer. Contributors focus on subjects including Egyptology, 1890s decadence, Edwardian super-villains and Chinese dragon ladies, and the Arabian Nights. The result is a testimony to the enduring fascination and relevance of Rohmer's absurd, sinister and immensely atmospheric world.