Nick Dear: 7 books

This first collection of Nick Dear's work for the stage displays the breadth and achievement of one of the most talented and inventive dramatists writing in Britain today. The volume contains two of his re-workings of eighteenth-century history, The Art of Success and In the Ruins, his intelligent...

Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie.Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein's bewildered...

Patron? Collaborator? Employer? Voyeur? Lover? Questioned about the nature of his relationship with the 3rd Earl of Southampton, William Shakespeare is on trial. The evidence: tender poems, financial dependency, attempted revolution. A compelling new drama set in Elizabethan England...

The Hogarth Plays catch one of England's most celebrated artists at two crucial points in his career: once at the beginning, and once at the end. In The Art of Success the events of ten tumultuous years are compressed into a single night, as newlywed William Hogarth makes his way through eighteenth-century...

Some say power's an illusion. But Louis is the master of illusion. He has turned government into a spectacle, politics into a circus. Nick Dear's new play on the origins of the Sun King is a dark and dazzling tale of ambition, corruption and illusion. The play premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London, in June 2003.

The Syrian desert. Third century AD. Zenobia, warrior Queen of Palmyra, moves her forces into battle with Aurelian, Emperor of Rome. Meanwhile, her son is engaged in bizarre chemical experiments with Porphyry, a philosophy student with his own secret. A story of love and adventure at the time...

Deep in the Hampshire countryside Edward Thomas, disaffected husband, exhausted father and tormented writer, scrapes a living. In 1913 he meets American poet Robert Frost and everything changes. As their friendship blossoms Edward writes, emerging from his cocoon of self-doubt into one of the most...