D. J Taylor
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An award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, drawing on new sources available for the first time, shows how the way we look at a writer and his canon has changed over the course of the last two decades, presenting a fresh and relevant biography seen through a post-millennial prism.
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Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, an exquisite tale of romance and rivalry, gambling and greed, from one of England's finest writers.
As the shadows lengthen over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Down?high life and low life, society beauties and White chapel street girls, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and thieves. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air? This is Derby Day.
For months people have been waiting...
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A rich and evocative portrait of one of the greatest authors of Victorian England Who was William Makepeace Thackeray? Was he the wealthy dilettante who came to London in the 1830s and squandered his fortune on newspapers? Was he the impoverished freelance author of the 1840s who scrapped for every penny he could get? Or was he the great writer who published Vanity Fair in 1847, skewering Victorian society and ensuring his literary legacy? Throughout...
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Before the media circus of Britney, Paris, and our modern obsession with celebrity, there were the Bright Young People, a voraciously pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites who romped through the gossip columns of 1920s London. Evelyn Waugh immortalized their slang, their pranks, and their tragedies in his novels, and over the next half century, many-from Cecil Beaton to Nancy Mitford and John Betjeman-would become...
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"Who were the Lost Girls? Chic, glamorous, and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Parlade cut a swath through English literary and artistic life at the height of World War II."--Amazon
6) Ask Alice
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A literary tour-de-force ranging from the American frontier to Edwardian England and the decadent carousing of the Bright Young People of London's jazz age.1904. A pretty young woman travels apprehensively across the American prairies; on a whim she makes a bold decision, grabbing her future with both hands. A quarter of a century later, in the brightly colored world of London high life, Alice Keach is queen among society hostesses. Her face stares...
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If Wallis Simpson had not died on the operating table in December 1936, Edward VIII would not have been King of England three years later. He would have abdicated for "the woman he loves," but now, the throne beckons. If Henry Bannister's car had not careened off the Colombo back-road in the summer before the war, Cynthia Kirkpatrick would never have found out about The Faction.
It is autumn 1939, and everything in history is just as it was. Except,...
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Since its publication nearly seventy years ago, George Orwell's 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of "alternative facts." The world we live in is often described as an Orwellian one, awash in inescapable...
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An entertainer looks back on his life in this novel based on the rise and fall of a famous British comedy team From the vantage point of late middle age, Edward "Ted" King-one half of the dynamic duo Upward & King-discovers that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. Ted met Arthur Upward in Britain's National Service. They started out doing gigs at Soho cabarets, and in the mid-sixties, they took their act on the road. By the late seventies, they were...
10) Flame Music: Rock and Roll is Life: Part II: The True Story of Resurgam Records by One Who Was There
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Ready to rock and roll through the tumultuous times of the music industry?
Our protagonist, Nick Du Pont, is a savvy manager navigating the highs and lows of the music scene in the 70s and 80s. He's a man on a mission, dealing with difficult artists, and battling to get his bands played on popular radio shows.
Can Nick sign the unpredictable band 'The Flame Throwers' and manage their wild ways? Will he be able to keep up with the rapidly changing...
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A wanderer struggles to understand his uncle's downfall six years after a financial catastrophe George Chell has never met a man as witty, as charming, or as brilliant as his uncle. Edward Chell was a financial titan, ruling over a kingdom of profit with an emperor's savage grace-until a stock market crash revealed that everything he had was built on sand. It destroyed both empire and emperor in one fell swoop, and nephew George was cast out into...
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Past and present collide for a man on a mission to document a history that may or may not exist, in this ingenious novel by the acclaimed author of Derby Day Dr. Feelgood's is a brothel overrun with fat, overindulged mice that lies at the western tip of a remote village somewhere in the Far East. It's presided over by Mr. Mouzookseem, an illiterate Englishman with his own reasons for fleeing the family fold for a life of anonymity. This is the beginning-or...
13) Orwell: The Life
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Winner of the Whitbread Biography Award: the authoritative biography of one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century It was not easy to bury George Orwell. After a lifetime of iconoclasm, during which he professed no interest in religion and no affiliation with any church, he asked to be buried in an Anglican churchyard-but none would have him. Orwell's friends fought for him to have a proper grave, however, and the author of 1984, Animal...
14) Kept: A Novel
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When Henry Ireland dies unexpectedly from what appears to be a riding accident in August 1863, the failed landowner leaves behind little save his high-strung young widow, Isabel-who somehow ends up in the home of Ireland's friend James Dixey. A celebrated naturalist, Dixey collects strange trophies in his secluded, decaying manse and has questionable associations with rather unsavory characters-including a pair of thuggish poachers named Dewar and...
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You may remember the Helium Kids. Back in their late '60s and early '70s heyday they appeared on Top of the Tops on 27 separate occasions, released five Billboard-certified platinum albums, played sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and were nearly, but not quite, as big as the Beatles and the Stones. Three decades later, in the big house on the outskirts of Norwich, Nick Du Pont is looking back on the rollercoaster years he spent as their publicist...
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A screenwriter is about to discover that in life there are no rewrites Martin Benson writes scripts for porn films. He didn't always aspire to be a screenwriter; he once had dreams of becoming a great journalist. But life has a way of interfering with the best-laid plans. In this darkly captivating novel, Martin shares the story of his past- and a future that is yet to be written. Martin's search for that elusive thing called happiness takes him...
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Eighteen tales featuring down-on-their-luck characters whose dreams will never come true, by Man Booker Prize–long-listed author D. J. Taylor In the vein of Raymond Carver's short prose, these eighteen stories sharply capture ordinary people desperate to escape their dead-end lives as they grapple with failure, disappointment, and missed chances. In "Dreams of Leaving," Harlem pornographer Fuchs has seen it all; though he has never traveled farther...
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A thirty-something, would-be master of the universe tries to reinvent himself in London in this hip and hilarious novel about ambition, family, missed connections, and Anglo-American relations It is the late nineties. The Iraqis are in Kuwait and the former decade's financial bubble has burst. From his high-backed swivel chair in an eight-foot cubicle on the sixth floor of a London management-consulting firm, Scott Marshall prays he can survive the...
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The essential backstory to the creation and meaning of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, and now the twenty-first.
Since its publication nearly seventy years ago, George Orwell's “1984” has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for...
20) The Lost Girls
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Who were the Lost Girls? Chic, glamorous, and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Parlade cut a swath through English literary and artistic life at the height of World War II. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt. They had very different-and sometimes...