Karl Popper 1902-1994The political history of the twentieth century has been full of savage 'certainties'. A similar idea of history warranted the callous savageries of both Marxism and Fascism. They shared a faith in what Karl Popper called 'Historicism': the belief that the future could be predicted and that man had to align himself with its bloody progress.Totalitarianism, Popper maintained, was based on ideas implicit in Western philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and Marx....

"Kennaway's best book. More than any of his other books, it testifies to his extraordinary poetic talent and the power of his human insight." - John le Carré"If there is any justice at all . . . Kennaway's stock will rise posthumously. He could, after all, write rings around many of his more famous contemporaries. And is it too much to hope that he will be remembered at least partly as the author of The Cost of Living Like This, his last and probably best novel?&quot...

A The Tablet Book of the YearLast Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphael's compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells.Its inti...

A writer's wry observations about the glamorous worlds of Hollywood and literary London during the second half of the 1970s are offered in this autobiography. Though Frederic Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the rich and famous and has little interest in names and gossip, he notices and comments on the discrepancies between public and private faces to convey the texture of life around him. His notebooks, never originally intended for publication but contained in this compilation...

We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as 'Byr- ' when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron's, ...

My notebooks are my conscience,' writes Frederic Raphael. 'They contain a writer's letters to himself.' This second volume of his notebooks covers the first three years of the 1970s: years of slump, treacheries and deceits in the film world, of literary achievement and private tragi-comedies - the storm that washes away weeks of hard work in the garden of the Raphaels' French farmhouse, the serious accident in which his father nearly dies, before being unexpectedly restored to alarmingly i...

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to train myself to notice things as they were'. He continues this practice today, though the word 'things' has come to embrace more or less everything that matters in the writer's world. These not...

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Ticks and Crosses covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of Ticks and Crosses are an account of a farcical sum...

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to train myself to notice things as they were'. He continues this practice today, though the word 'things' has come to embrace more or less everything that matters in the writer's world. These not...

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. 'Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written,' as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review, these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's f...

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Personal Terms, was greeted in the TLS as 'a small masterpiece'. With the publication of Cuts and Bruises, the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. Cuts and Bruises concerns the 1970s, during which Raphael travelled widely (not least to Hollywood, which yields a mordantly sweet and sour account of figures such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John Schlesinger) and wrote the acclaimed tel...

In the twelfth century, Pope Clement III declared: 'The Pope is resolved to be the lord and master of the world's game.' Yet history has proven to be much more complex.In this epic narrative, Frederic Raphael explores the most significant moments, ideas and figures that have shaped the world's stage. He takes us on a journey through history: from the reigns of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, to Plato and Socrates and the origins of philosophy, the turning point of World War ...