D. J Taylor
1) Derby Day
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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 and plotting for this day. Everyone 's eyes are on champion horse Tiberius, on whose performance half a dozen destinies depend. In this...
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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...
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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 70 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 surveillance...
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The Booker Prize—nominated author of Derby Day delivers a sumptuous cultural history as seen through the lives of four enigmatic women.
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...
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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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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A fresh examination of George Orwell by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers.
We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and...
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D.J. Taylor's Bright Young People offers a scintillating portrait of 1920s London and the birth of the cult of celebrity.
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...
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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...
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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...
13) 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...