Frederic Raphael: 17 books

From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37–c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world.   Joseph ben Mattathias’s transformation...

This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least for correspondents in the twenty-first century, is that Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein...

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to...

A sharp, often surprising, view of the classical world by a major classics scholar at Cambridge and author of The Glittering Prizes This book is the culmination of more than sixty years of a writing life during which Frederic Raphael has returned again and again to the literature and landscape of the...

Spanning the first five years of the 1970s, this installment of Frederic Raphael’s view of his own life is at once intimate and detached, a detachment made palpable by months spent in the French farmhouse he purchased at the end of the booming 1960s. Although seemingly poised to direct and write...

Karl Popper 1902-1994 The political history of the twentieth century has been full of savage 'certainties'. A similar idea of history warranted the callous savageries of both Marxism and Fascism. They shared a faith in what Karl Popper called 'Historicism': the belief that the future could...

A writer’s wry observations about the glamorous worlds of Hollywood and literary London during the second half of the 1970s are offered in this autobiography. Though Frederic Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the rich and famous and has little interest in names and gossip, he notices and...

From literary portrayals of 'the Jew' as Biblical traitor or Dickensian villain to the very real atrocities of the Holocaust and the conflicts in Israel and Palestine, the plight of the Jewish people throughout history has been as violent and volatile as the animosity towards the religion itself....

Compulsively readable, wise, and mischievous by turns, this sixth volume from the collection of Frederic Raphael’s personal journals chronicles his eventful life in the seemingly glamorous worlds of 1980s Hollywood and literary London. Included are his encounters with Mary Whitehouse and Meryl Streep,...

Charlie Marsden has to come to terms with a woman whom he cannot help but love unconditionally but who can never quite be his in this portrait of a vanishing generationWho is Katya Lowell and what is the secret of her life? A beautiful, seemingly cool painter of unnerving images in 1970s London, she...

Witty and stylish, these extracts from Frederic Raphael’s journal chronicle the life and reflections of the screenwriter. Of special interest to film enthusiasts, this candid memoir includes encounters with David Garnett and Rebecca West-and their vivid recollections of H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey,...

"Kennaway's best book. More than any of his other books, it testifies to his extraordinary poetic talent and the power of his human insight." - John le Carré "If there is any justice at all . . . Kennaway's stock will rise posthumously. He could, after all, write rings around...

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...

Mixing observations about friends and family with short sketches and literary gossip, this third installment of the author's notebooks updates an intriguing personal and cultural record. Starting where Rough Copy: Personal Terms II left off, the story of one contemporary writer's life is resumed in anecdotes, aphorisms, journal entries, reviews, and vignettes of people and places.