John Carey Bücher

A new edition of an invaluable collection of literary sources, all in translation, for Celtic Europe and early Ireland and Wales. The selections are divided into three sections: the first is classical authors on the ancient celts-a huge selection including both the well-known-Herodotos, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Diogenes Laertius, and Cicero-and the obscure-Pseudo-Scymnus, Lampridius, Vopsicus, Clement of Alexandria and Ptolemy I. The second is early Irish and Hiberno-Latin sources including early Irish dynastic poetry and numerous tales from the Ulster cycle and the third consists of Brittonic sources, mostly Welsh.

What was it like to be caught in the firestorm that destroyed Pompeii? To have dinner with Attila the Hun? To watch the charge of the Light Brigade? To see the Titanic slide beneath the waves? John Carey's best-selling "Faber Book of Reportage" draws its eyewitness account from memoirs, travel books and newspapers. This is history with the varnish removed. "A quite stunning collection. There are descriptions in this book so fresh that they sear themselves into the imagination". (Jeremy Paxman)

In 1954 William Golding was 43 years old and a nobody. He had been demobbed from the navy at the end of World War Two and returned to his pre-war job teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Always hard up, he lived in what he called a “lousy council flat” with his wife, Ann, and their two young children. In 1952 he finished the novel that was to become Lord of the Flies, and sent it to five publishers and a literary agency. They all rejected it. The sixth publisher he tried was Faber and Faber, and the professional reader wrote her opinion on the typescript: “Time the Future. Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull.” But the novel was rescued from the reject pile by a new recruit to Faber, and when it was finally published in September 1954 the poet Stevie Smith greeted it as “this beautiful and desperate book”. In the early 1960s cultural commentators noted that Lord of the Flies was replacing Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as the bible of the American adolescent. Its anti-war tenor helped to ensure its profound impact on the young at a time when the Cold War was hotting up. Since then, his masterpiece has established itself as a modern classic. In this short, compelling guide, John Carey tells us how and why.

The first biography of Nobel Prize winning novelist William Golding by celebrated writer and critic, John Carey. Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding's intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man.

A new approach to Thackeray. Although this study embraces all his work, it switches attention from his late novels, and bases the case for his imaginative vitality on the multifarious material - reviews, travel books, burlesques, "Punch" articles - that he turned out, mostly under severe financial stress, at the start of his writing career. Here was the breeding ground of "Vanity Fair"; here we find the subversive Thackeray, foe of humbug and high art, waylaying snobbery and the cant of social reformers with bravura and buffoonery - the Thackeray who, in Trollope's words, 'laughed, and ate, and drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion.' In portraying the range and intensity of Thackeray's imagination, topics singled out include: light and painting; ballet dancers; pantomime; "haute cuisine"; time's ruins; and the rainbow realm of commerce. The picture of Thackeray, as man and artist, that emerges, is fresh and challenging.

After its publication in 1667, John Milton's Paradise Lost was celebrated throughout Europe as a supreme achievement of the human spirit.

A collection of John Carey's greatest, wisest, and wittiest reviews-amassed over a lifetime of writing

Winner of the 1987 Whitbread Book of the Year.

Utopias come in every conceivable cultural and sexual shade: communist, fascist, anarchist, green, techno-fantastic, all male, all female. John Carey's anthology encompasses many noble schemes, as well as chilling attempts at social control.