Faber Faber: 1353 books

Immortalized as the author of The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers led a life quite as enigmatic and adventurous as his classic novel.Childers was orphaned at an early age. Though he was brought up in County Wicklow, he received an English education that culminated in a clerkship to the...

After all the endeavours that combined to make Britain the first great industrial nation, that dominant position was then relinquished. Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914), the driven and self-made Birmingham businessman who shifted his energies formidably into politics, might have appeared to be one leader...

W. H. Auden disapproved of literary biography. Or did he? The truth is far more equivocal than at first seems apparent. There is no denying he delivered himself of such unambiguous pronouncements as 'Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.'; and that he asked for his...

Yes, Minister, and the equally successful sequel Yes, Prime Minister captured a niche in the political consciousness of the nation. First broadcast thirty years ago, the original writers of these classic series have reunited to create a bang up to date Yes, Prime Minister for the stage. Spin,...

On 26 April 1937, in the rubble of the bombed city of Guernica, the world's press scrambled to submit their stories. But one journalist held back, and spent an extra day exploring the scene. His report pointed the finger at secret Nazi involvement in the devastating aerial attack. It was the lead...

Whistling Psyche A dark night, an old waiting room and two supposed strangers eager to reach their destinations. In the cold hours that rest between nightfall and daybreak, silent questions prompt unexpected revelations. Two souls share a passion for reform, but only one - Miss Nightingale - has been...

The journal of Benjamin Haydon was, Max Beerbohm reported to Siegfried Sassoon, the best diary Beerbohm had ever read. Harold Acton declared Haydon 'a more exciting figure than Ruskin.' H.H. Asquith compared him favourably with Rousseau, while Aldous Huxley declared that 'Never was anyone more clearly...

Few subjects invoke such passion as the history and current situation of Jews in Western societies. David Goldberg, a progressive Rabbi with many years' experience of dealing with other faiths and other Jews, takes the most difficult issues of this fraught relationship and confronts them head on....

'You have discovered a perishable treasure, and it is imperative to share it with other people before it fades... You have only one chance to get it right, while the impression is still fresh...'If critics often disagree among themselves over the merits of a given work, this is nothing compared...

Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' (The Times). I Knew the Bride is Williams' eleventh collection of poems, and his first since West End...

'Joseph Hone went to Zaire for the BBC. His aim was a series of talks about crossing Africa from coast to coast, as Stanley had done. That intention began, and ended, in Kinshasha... Having fallen in love in boyhood with the idea of Africa, he had looked for 'great liberating spaces', and found himself...

In his preface to the 1998 reissue, Michael Foot wrote, 'Guilty Men was conceived by three London journalists who had formed the habit of meeting on the roof of the Evening Standard offices in Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, just after the the afternoon paper had been put to bed and, maybe, just before the...

'On A Balcony is devoted to the 14th century [B.C.] and the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, his sister-wife Nefertiti, the sculptor Tutmose, and the rivalry his religion of Aton brought to Egypt and its then current cult of Amon... presenting Ikhnaton's imposition of a new religion upon those who look on him as...

'I have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and Devil.' One is tempted to say only John Cowper Powys could have...