Böcker av Frederic Raphael

In the twelfth century, Pope Clement III declared: 'The Pope is resolved to be the lord and master of the world's game'. Yet history has proven to be much more complex.In this epic narrative, Frederic Raphael explores the most significant moments, ideas and figures that have shaped the world's stage. He takes us on a journey through history: from the reigns of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, to Plato and Socrates and the origins of philosophy, the turning point of World War Two and the invention of the atom bomb, and finally the social and cultural divisions of modern day. It is often a story of conflict: the rise of anti-Semitism, the tensions between science and faith, progress and strife, comedy and ruthlessness.Thought-provoking and compelling, The World's Game weaves a tapestry of the Western world and the power struggles that have shaped it.

"Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary critic, exchanged e-mails sporadically over the years, usually commenting on each other's various writings. Then one day in 2009, Raphael wrote to Epstein to suggest that, since they enjoyed a benevolence toward each other unusual among literary men, they begin an exchange of e-mail correspondence on a regular basis. His thought was that, at the end of a year or so, the result might be an interesting book. Epstein, who had long admired Raphael's writing, agreed. The two men had never met, nor had they even spoken over the phone. Their friendship was conducted entirely online. Each week they exchanged e-mails of roughly 2,000 words. They discovered a great many things about each other they hadn't previously known. They shared, for example, a common birthplace in Chicago, where Raphael was born, though his family moved to England in 1938, and his education after that was exclusively English. Each man belongs to that dolorous fraternity of those who have buried a child. Their literary tastes vary, though not widely, since both grew up admiring the great modernist writers and both had an enduring love for Greek and Roman culture. Both men share a fundamental agreement about what, in artistic and intellectual realms, is serious. Raphael and Epstein are artists who happen also to be intellectuals. The result is that few subjects are off limits to them. They are of an age when they have long ceased to worry about their reputations. Wherever else they may look, it is not over their shoulders. Candor reinforced by comedy is the reigning note of Where Were We? as it was of Distant Intimacy, their earlier volume of e-mail correspondence. Writing about other writers, actors, politics, the movies, intellectual fashions, the writing life, and much else, both men say precisely what they think, and say it in high style. Readers may or may not agree with their strong views, but they will never find their thoughts other than fascinating. "--

Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are top friends of his. Why, then, is he left to languish in the grand hotel owned by Verdugo, which in Spanish means executioner? What is the relationship between Victor, who can write equally well with left hand or right, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, about whom he once made a film, a film which is showing on TV as he enters his suite? Who is the beautiful girl whom he sees in the lobby, and is she the same girl who is later found dead under sinister circumstances? Is Victor England a victim or a killer?There have been many novels about Hollywood. There has never been one like this. Frederic Raphael's vision of California Time is of a 'sequence of presents', and his innovations in the form of the novel serve only to add to the multi-faceted strangeness of the 'celluloid capital'. Victor England, young and old at the same time, is a man of many wives and many films, rich and yet dependent on the bounty of a failing industry, whose golden slave he is.

Marion and Barnaby Pierce are an American couple who are about to sell the New England house in which they have raised what seems to be a happy family. They are leaving on a trip across America in a vintage jaguar which Barnaby intends to give his son who is getting married in Los Angeles. Their long drive from coast to coast is planned to include a number of stops: the first to deposit their dog with Marion's pious, bitter sister in upstate New York.At every stop there are memories and surprises as Barnaby and Marion live and re-live their secret dramas and, in the allusive, edgy dialogues of a long-married couple, reveal more about themselves than they care to confess. In Minneapolis, they find that their daughter, Stacey, is pregnant by one man and living with another; in Chicago, Barnaby's old writing partner, now a millionaire businessman, is unwisely lured into an old vaudeville routine; in Seattle, a meeting with a newspaper editor who once loved Marion re-opens old wounds; and in Los Angeles, their other daughter, Zara, who now calls herself Zenobia, turns out to be a shockingly unsociable member of her brother's wedding.

First published in 1965, this is a tale of the face that has launched a thousand billboards. Diana Scott is "The Happiness Girl" in ads plastered all over the country, and she's hunting happiness in more ways than she's care to confess. She's the darling of the rich and powerful: of Prince Cesare della Romita...of TV writer and interviewer Robert Gold...of suave business success Miles Brand.She's the life of the Dolce Vita, Paris version - a reckless seeker of self, caught up in a frenzied sexcursion of jet-set Europe. This is her story - a novel based on the bold and powerful Joseph E. Levine motion picture.

A sharp, often surprising, view of the classical world by a major classics scholar at Cambridge and author of The Glittering Prizes