Paul Scott

Instead of returning “home” when he retired, Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, and his wife Lily chose to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire.

Staying on

It is the last, bitter days of World War II and the British Raj in India is crumbling. Ensconced in the Indian Hill Station of Pankot are the English wives, mothers, daughters and widows of the officers embroiled in the ongoing conflict. With their old beliefs and assumptions under increasingly virulent attack, all eyes are upon Captain Merrick and the British military to protect them in this troubled time. But Merrick, though outwardly a consummate professional, is brutal and corrupt, and not even his machinations can stop the change that is swiftly and inevitably approaching, change which is increasingly undermining the old myth of British invincibility...

The Towers of Silence

Il gioiello della corona. The Raj Quartet

Il giorno dello scorpione. The Raj Quartet

Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India during World War II, this powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them. A coming of age tale, The Birds of Paradise is the story of a boy and his childhood friendship with the daughter of a British diplomat and the son of the Raja. Scott artfully brings his young narrator’s voice to life with evocative language and an eye for detail, capturing the pangs of childhood and the bittersweet fog of memory with nostalgic yet immediate prose

A Novel

The Birds of Paradise

"In Painted Clay, Paul Scott proposes an alternative version of ceramic history ... one where form and function are not dominant, but where painting and the graphic development of ceramic surface are the prime concerns. Covering a range from pre-Dynastic Egyptian painting on pots, through Chinese porcelain, Persian Minai ware and Maiolica to the blue and white of the industrialized West, he charts the development of increasingly sophisticated painted and graphic works." "The book takes an extensive overview of today's contemporary (graphic) ceramic scene, and the figures and movements that have influenced it. In exploring the use "painters" such as Picasso, Miro, the CoBrA Group, Conrad Atkinson, and others have made of ceramics, it also examines the relationships artists have had with the pottery industry, from Soviet Revolutionary Propaganda ware to collaborations at the Wedgwood Pottery company. It highlights a wide range of work by contemporary ceramic artists, painters, and printmakers from around the world: Ann Kraus, Cindy Kolodziejski, Eric Mellon, Grayson Perry, and many others." "This book should appeal to anyone interested in ceramics, as well as to painters, printmakers, graphic artists, and all those generally interested in the visual arts."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Graphic Arts and the Ceramic Surface

Painted Clay

A deep, insightful look into the inspiring and often turbulent life and career of Eric Clapton Motherless Child is the ultimate celebration and definitive biography of one of the most influential musicians alive today. From the 1960s graffiti proclaiming "Clapton is God," to his seminal work in supergroup Cream and his phenomenally successful solo career, Eric Clapton has achieved the status of bona fide living legend and enduring icon. Now in his sixth decade in the music business, he occupies an exulted position at the pinnacle of the rock world thanks to songs like Layla, Tears in Heaven, and Wonderful Tonight, and for many is considered the greatest guitarist who ever lived. This book will chart his rise to stardom in the 60s and his unparalleled success since walking out of the Yardbirds as a 20-year-old to follow his chosen path of the blues with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and later with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in supergroup Cream, as well as his successful solo career. However, his success has come at a price. Once a happy well-adjusted boy, the young Clapton was devastated by the realization at the age of nine that the woman he thought was his sister was in fact his mother, and that the couple he thought were his parents were his maternal grandparents. His treatment by his mother was also to shape his future turbulent relationships with the women in his life, including his failed first marriage to model Pattie Boyd, who was married to Clapton's close friend George Harrison when he fell for her. Motherless Child also chronicles his battles with the demons of drugs and alcohol, his successful journey to sobriety, and examines his legacy as one of the most influential musicians of his generation. This is essential reading for any Clapton fan.

The Definitive Biography of Eric Clapton

Motherless Child

Set against the backdrop of Gandhi's calls for independence and a potential Japanese invasion, four masterful historical novels--The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils--covering the period between the Quit India riots of 1942 and the massacres that accompanied independence and partition in 1947 provide insight into the closing years of British rule in India.

The Raj Quartet: The jewel in the crown

Arthur Kippax hates his name, but there's nothing he can do about it.He's a child of the 1950's, growing up in the 1960's in Sheffield - the Steel City. His parents are down-to-Earth, working class, as are most of his friends, but he will eventually go to Grammar School, learn to stand up for a principle, sit on his own chair and benefit from a good State Education. He will also learn that life is never fair, that God does not suffer little children but causes little children to suffer, in different and often insidious ways. The music of "The Swinging Sixties" becomes a soundtrack for his life, loves and adventures.

A Path to Jupiter

Continues the story of the last days British rule in India in the early 1940's.

The Day of the Scorpion

This satirical poem, known popularly as the Miliade because of its thousand-verse length (in octosyllabic verse), was printed anonymously around 1636. The poem's endurance and plentiful and specific political references make it a lively commentary encompassing discontent with the increasingly centralized government before the outbreak of the civil wars, the Frondes (1648-53).

Le Gouvernement présent, ou éloge de son Eminence, satyre ou la Miliade

Janis Tedesco Haswell

If novelist Paul Mark Scott (1920-1978) has secured a niche in English literature, it is on the merits of his Raj Quartet and its sequel, Staying On, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1977. Yet by the time he had published The Jewel in the Crown in 1966, he had supported his family on his writing for six years, worked as a literary advisor for several publishers, routinely written book reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and Country Life, and published eight novels. Scott's literary reputation was already considerable when, at the age of 44, he embarked on The Raj Quartet that would take up the last fourteen years of his life-a masterpiece that reinterpreted the major events of his generation and challenged his contemporaries to face the legacy of their past. Beginning in 1964, Scott negotiated with the Harry Ransom Research Center at The University of Texas-Austin for the purchase of his manuscripts. Later, when he was teaching creative writing at the University of Tulsa in 1976, he arranged to sell his letters to the archives at McFarlin Library. Many years after his death, David Higham Associates (the literary agency for which Scott worked from 1950-1960 and which acted as Scott's own agent until his death in 1978) sold archival materials to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin. Only a limited amount of material from McFarlin's Paul Scott Collection has been published to date. The David Higham Collection has not been systematically used until now. Together, the Tulsa and Austin Collections involve many thousands of Scott's professional and personal letters, to a large degree untapped by scholars of literature. In this two-volume collection, Janis Haswell makes available to the reading public for the first time several hundred letters from the Tulsa and Austin archives, as well as dozens of private letters to daughters Carol and Sally Scott. Scott's letters never disappoint. They are intriguing, well-penned and (in most cases) well-preserved in carbon form by Scott himself. They explore in depth and detail available nowhere else his view of the themes and structure of his novels; his experience and views of India; his dealings with publishers, agents, critics, readers, and writer friends (the likes of Muriel Spark, Gabriel Fielding, M. M. Kaye); his role as an agent and influential reviewer of fiction; his trials in supporting himself and family as a freelancer; his experience as a teacher in the United States; and his love and loyalty to family and friends.

Behind Paul Scott's Raj Quartet: The early years, 1940-1965

In The Day of the Scorpion, Scott draws us deeper in to his epic of India at the close of World War II. With force and subtlety, he recreates both private ambition and perversity, and the politics of an entire subcontinent at a turning point in history. As the scorpian, encircled by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, so does the British raj hasten its own destruction when threatened by the flames of Indian independence. Brutal repression and imprisonment of India's leaders cannot still the cry for home rule. And in the midst of chaos, the English Laytons withdraw from a world they no longer know to seek solace in denial, drink, and madness.

The Raj Quartet, Volume 2

Dopo Il gioiello della corona, il secondo volume di The Raj Quartet, capolavoro del Novecento definito il Guerra e pace anglo-indiano. India, 1942. L’Impero britannico è una fortezza in rovina. L’eco dello stupro di Daphne Manners e dell’incarcerazione di Hari Kumar non si è ancora spenta, mentre Ronald Merrick, il responsabile dell’iniquo trattamento di Kumar (nonché di ripetute torture ai suoi danni), è diventato ufficiale dell’esercito. Trattenuto in prigione per un anno, Hari non è mai stato informato del fatto che Daphne ha partorito una bambina e poi è morta. È in questo scenario che fanno la loro apparizione i Layton, un’antica famiglia del Raj le cui vicende si intrecceranno a quelle del primo libro del quartetto. In primo piano, le due giovani figlie: Sarah, vero centro morale della storia, incapace di venire a patti con l’ambiguità dei suoi connazionali, e Susan, che spinta da un senso di vuoto sposerà Teddie Bingham, un incolore e convenzionale ufficiale del prestigioso reggimento Fucilieri di Pankot, compagno di stanza di Merrick. Gli inglesi non sono più ciò che erano: come lo scorpione circondato da un anello di fuoco – protagonista di un’immagine impressa nella memoria di Susan – finirà per incontrare la morte, così il Raj britannico, minacciato dalle fiamme dell’indipendenza indiana, si avvicina alla propria fine. E nel mezzo del caos, gli inglesi si ritirano da un mondo che non conoscono più per cercare conforto nella negazione, nell’alcol e nella follia. Con grande forza e sottigliezza, Paul Scott si spinge ancora più a fondo nella sua epopea indiana, raccontando un intero subcontinente giunto a un punto di svolta. Su Il gioiello della corona è stato scritto: «È un’opera poderosa e avvincente, e penso che ancora oggi possa incontrare il favore del pubblico. Si rassicuri il lettore, Paul Scott è uno scrittore amico: la sua prosa è leggera e scorrevole». Luigi Sampietro, «Il Sole 24 Ore» «L’autore è maestro nell’intrecciare drammi macroscopici e vicende personali. Seguendo e incastonando le vite di sei personaggi, Scott allestisce un romanzo coloniale che dietro un dramma privato svela le secolari crudeltà degli inglesi nei confronti di un popolo che non vuole più essere il gioiello della corona britannica ma lotta per trovare la propria identità». Angelo Molica Franco, «il Venerdì – la Repubblica» «Una tetralogia sontuosa. Scott tesse un quadro storico con cura dei particolari, del miscuglio fra i sentimenti personali e la rivalsa di un paese narrato con acutezza». Francesco Musolino, «Il Foglio»

Il giorno dello scorpione

BOOK FOUR OF THE RAJ QUARTET The British Raj in India is in its final days. But the fall of the Empire is both the end of one era and the beginning of another. For the Hindus and Muslims, the political reality signals inevitable post-war recriminations and future territorial wrangles. For Guy Perron, Field Sergeant and historian, these last days are a time to reflect on the legacy the British has left behind in India. And for the British families still residing in India, decisions about their future must be made and final goodbyes must be said, all against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods of social change the world has ever seen.

A Division Of The Spoils

After exploiting India's divisions for years, the British depart in such haste that no one is prepared for the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947. The twilight of the raj turns bloody. Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, A Division of the Spoils illuminates one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India.

A Division of Spoils

The Raj Quartet, Volume 4

The towers of silence : Follows the decline of Barbie Batchelor, a one-time mission-school teacher, as the Anglo-Indian world begins to collapse around her.

The Raj Quartet: The towers of silence

BOOK FOUR OF THE RAJ QUARTETThe British Raj in India is in its final days. But the fall of the Empire is both the end of one era and the beginning of another. For the Hindus and Muslims, the political reality signals inevitable post-war recriminations a

A Division of the Spoils

BOOK TWO OF THE RAJ QUARTET India, August 9th 1942. The morning brings raids and the arrest by British police of Congress Party members. Amongst the prisoners is the distinguished ex-Chief Minister Mohammed Ali Kasim. Loyal to the party's central vision

BOOK ONE OF THE RAJ QUARTET India 1942: everything is in flux. World War II has shown that the British are not invincible and the self-rule lobby is gaining many supporters. Against this background, Daphne Manners, a young English girl, is brutally raped in the Bibighat Gardens. The racism, brutality and hatred launched upon the head of her young Indian lover echo the dreadful violence perpetrated on Daphne and reveal the desperate state of Anglo-Indian relations. The rift that will eventually prise India - the jewel in the Imperial Crown - from colonial rule is beginning to gape wide.

Paul Scott

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