William Makepeace Thackeray

David John Taylor

Sir Brian Newcome's marriage into the aristocratic Kew family brought titled respectability to his family's 'new' money. Now the marriage of his daughter Ethel is of crucial importance to both families in their quest for further advancement.

The Newcomes

A remarkable history of the 'lost generation' of the 1920s - parties, scandal, Jazz, clashing generations and the dark legacy of war.

The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918-1940

Bright Young People

In the last half-century George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight-Four have sold over 40 million copies. The adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language, while Orwell himself has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in Western political thought.

Orwell

"You may remember the Helium Kids. Back in their late '60s and early '70s heyday they appeared on Top of the Tops on 27 separate occasions, released five Billboard-certified platinum albums, played sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and were nearly, but not quite, as big as the Beatles and the Stones. Three decades later, in the big house on the outskirts of Norwich, Nick Du Pont is looking back on the rollercoaster years he spent as their publicist in a world of licensed excess and lurking tragedy. What follows is not only the story of a rock band at a formative time in musical history, when America was opening up to English music and huge amounts of money and self-gratification were there for the taking. For the tale is also Nick's - the life and times of a war-baby born in a Norwich council house, the son of an absconding GI, whose career is a search for some of the advantages that his birth denied him. It is at once a worm's eye of British pop music's golden age and a bittersweet personal journey, with cameo appearances from everyone from Elvis and Her Majesty the Queen Mother to Andy Warhol"--Dust jacket cover.

The True Story of the Helium Kids by One who was There: a Novel

Rock and Roll is Life

In the last half- century George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM and Nineteen EIGHTY- FOUR have sold over 40 million copies. He adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language, while Orwell himself has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Despite this iconic status, Orwell (born Eric Blair) remains an enigma- a passionate democratic socialist steeped in the worst illusions of his Edwardian boyhood, a bitter critic of totalitarianism who concealed a pronounced authoritarian streak, a supporter of social equality who promptly put his adoptive son down for Eton. His progress through the literary world of the 1930s and 40s was characterised by the myths he built around himself. Whether as a reluctant servant of the Raj in 1920s Burma, a mock down- and- out in inter- war England or a Republican volunteer in Spain, he fashioned an image that was often sharply at odds with the real circumstances of his life. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, including interviews with friends and people who knew him in his years of obscurity, D. J. Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage- managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. Moving and revealing, Taylor's Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero.

The Life

"Haunted by the ghosts of his fog-bound early life on the Norfolk coast, the church spires of Great Yarmouth and his father's sweet shop, Ted embarks on a mental journey full of unexpected twists and detours. What he discovers about himself and the eternally elusive figure of Upward turns out to have unexpected consequences for himself, Daniel and everyone else. Ranging in time and place from the rainswept Norfolk seafronts to 1960s Soho clubland, from bombs exploding in the Cyprus hills to Mosely's Daimler coursing though the East End, The Comedy Man is a mediation on post-war English life, confirming D.J. Taylor as one of the most imaginative novelists working in England today."--BOOK JACKET.

David John Taylor

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