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, ...

A sharp, often surprising, view of the classical world by a major classics scholar at Cambridge and author of The Glittering PrizesThis book is the culmination of more than sixty years of a writing life during which Frederic Raphael has returned again and again to the literature and landscape of the ancient world. In his new book, Raphael deploys his renowned wit and erudition to give us a vivid mosaic of the complexities and contradiction...

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 ...

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...

June 1978: Frederic Raphael is in a studio for the dubbing of his television play Something's Wrong, and a routine moment is captured by his wry alertness to vanities and foibles. Ifs and Buts continues the sharply stylish extracts from the journal of time spent, in the words of The Sunday Times, 'with one eye on life's greasy pole and the other on the eternal verities'. Both, for Raphael, are subjects for curiosity, scepticism and entertainment. Ifs and Buts includes encounters with David...

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...

This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least for correspondents in the twenty-first century, is that Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein have never met, nor even spoken to each other. But what is most rare about this book is the authors' abundant talent for entertaining their readers, as much when the topic is grave as when it ...

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...

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...

From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37–c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world.Joseph ben Mattathias’s transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal...

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...

Witty and stylish, these extracts from Frederic Raphael's journal chronicle the life and reflections of the screenwriter. Of special interest to film enthusiasts, this candid memoir includes encounters with David Garnett and Rebecca West—and their vivid recollections of H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, and London's Bloomsbury—in addition to accounts of working with Diana Dors and almost working with Diane Keaton. Offering a behind-the-scenes look into the world of moviemaking,...