Search results for ""Author D J Taylor""

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Book SynopsisBright Young People/ Making the most of our youth/ They talk in the Press of our social success/ But quite the reverse is the truth. [Noel Coward]The Bright Young People were one of the most extraordinary youth cults in British history. A pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites, they romped through the 1920s gossip columns. Evelyn Waugh dramatised their antics in Vile Bodies and many of them, such as Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford,Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman, later became household names. Their dealings with the media foreshadowed our modern celebrity culture and even today,we can detect their influence in our cultural life.But the quest for pleasure came at a price. Beneath the parties and practical jokes was a tormented generation, brought up in the shadow of war, whose relationships - with their parents and with each other - were prone to fracture. For many, their progress through the ''serious'' Thirties, wheTrade ReviewTaylor writes with such skill and aplomb that it's impossible not to be swept along by the intelligence and observations * Guardian *Shrewd and absorbing in his analysis of the way Waugh and Nancy Mitford promoted the world they would soon skewer in fiction * Sunday Times *Moving and always entertaining -- Jane Stevenson * Daily Telegraph *The depth and integrity of Taylor's research can only inspire awe and admiration. * Sunday Express *D J Taylor's enthusiasm, delivered with the zeal of a recent convert, proves there is fascination even in empty living and that the Bright Young Brigade of the 1920s are just as worthy of a book or two as Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Tamara Beckwith, Calum Best and all the flapping 'It-people' of our own generation -- Alexander Waugh * Literary Review *

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Book SynopsisOn Stewkey Blues: In his solid, grounded, entertaining collection of stories, DJ Taylor draws out the mythical qualities of East Anglia's terrain, urban or rural or somewhere marginal in between.' Hillary MantelMost of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes - but only sometimes taking a decisive step that will change their destinies.

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Book Synopsis'Rock and Roll is Life' is the new novel from the country's leading man of letters, D. J. Taylor.

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Book SynopsisFiction Category Winner in the 2022 East Anglian Book AwardsSome of the characters in Stewkey Blues have lived in Norfolk all their lives. Others are short-term residents or passage migrants. Whether young or old, self-confident or ground-down, local or blow-in, all of them are reaching uneasy compromises with the world they inhabit and the landscape in which that life takes place.Trade ReviewFamed though it is for its flatness, Norfolk is a county of manifold aspects, many of which are captured in these sharp, subtle new stories by native son DJ Taylor. They all emerged from 2020’s lockdown, and together delineate the region’s geographical and social range, occasionally squinting back in time and tuning in to mythical echoes. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Observer *The wide variety of experiences explored keeps this collection fresh and of interest. The author writes with elan as he excavates the core of the human condition. The reader is left hoping that Norfolk avoids the encroaching homogeny of modern expansionism. Each story provides a highly enjoyable and still lingering read. -- Jackie Law * neverimitate *There's urban ennui and dead-end lives in the suburbs of Norwich, loneliness in a caravan park outside Thetford; social codes traduced in a village near Shopham; and wild shotgun-toting lawlessness in the wilds of Breckland. Taylor has a gimlet eye for the telling detail and enjoys the oddity of Norfolk's eccentrics, those born and bred among its flat farmlands, and those attracted to the place like iron filings to a magnet. -- Siobham Murphy * The Times *DJ Taylor’s Stewkey Blues is set not only in the (culturally and geographically) different territory of Norfolk, but in a different time too. Several of his tales are set in the 20th century and his tone and points of reference across the collection are redolent of this era. His characters namecheck The Wind in the Willows and Top of the Pops, PG Wodehouse and the Benny Hill Show. People dating are ‘walking out’ together; the new Bill Bryson is ‘jolly good’. The collection’s realm is the provincial domestic: the middle managers, shop owners, minor public school boys and lesser gentry of Norfolk fret over the ‘damp-course’ and bleeding the radiators, unspoken social mores and petty social interactions. -- Melanie White * Literary Review *The stories are subtly composed and elegantly written. The narrative voice is attractively wry, and particularly acute in its choice of telling detail. Its air of savouring diffidence, moreover, is curiously reminiscent of Anthony Powell, particularly in our sense that behaviour is being observed far more than judged. No one should be deterred by the Norfolk setting, for only in the most literal sense is this provincial fiction. After Stewkey Blues, I for one would happily read Taylor about anywhere: Swaffham and Snoring (Little or Great), to be sure, but also Timbuktu. -- Andrew Rosenheim * Spectator *

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Book SynopsisOrwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective ''Orwellian'' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, 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.Trade ReviewTaylor wins the biographical contest...[He] is an accomplished literary critic and he illuminates Orwell's work in the context of his life elegantly and expertly * Guardian *Taylor's book has the unmistakable depth of flavour that comes from long, slow, careful cooking-pithy and fascinating -- Jan Dalley * Financial Times *Taylor writes with such skill and aplomb that it's impossible not to be swept along by the intelligence and observations * Independent on Sunday *Taylor's biography is a persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell's work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life-[it] is likely to prove in many ways definitive * Daily Telegraph *Fetchingly original...Taylor's [biography] is pacy socio-journalism -- Ian Thomson * Scotland on Sunday *

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Book SynopsisTAYLORThese three brilliant novels span Henry Green's career as a novelist and display his unique talents as a writer. In Blindness, Green's first novel, a young man is blinded in a senseless accident but thereafter discovers new imaginative powers.Trade ReviewThe finest living English novelist -- W. H. AudenExperimental in tone; spare and sensuous by turns, irradiated by stylistic fireworks... his novels are dazzling exercises in form -- D.J Taylor * Independent *One cannot think of another modernist writer so neglected and yet so warmly humane * The Times *Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century... his writing is wonderfully seductive - as oblique, suggestive and full of surprises as life itself * Daily Telegraph *The most curious imagination in the English novel -- V.S. Pritchett

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Book SynopsisThis is the third edition of the highly successful book, Biological Science. The text has been revised and updated to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest syllabuses. New material has been added in the following areas: human health and disease, microbiology and biotechnology, and the applications of genetics. Questions and practical work permeate the text and useful appendices are included covering biological chemistry, biological techniques and statistics. Biological Science is available as two soft cover volumes and as a combined volume hardback.Table of Contents1. Introduction to the subject; 2. Classification; 3. Chemicals of life; 4. Enzymes; 5. Cells; 6. Histology; 7. Autotrophic nutrition; 8. Heterotrophic nutrition; 9. Energy utilisation; 10. Organisms in their environment; 11. Quantitative ecology; 12. Microbiology and biotechnology; Answers and discussion; 13. Transport in plants; 14. Transport in animals; 15. Coordination and control in plants; 16. Coordination and control in animals; 17. Movement and support; 18. Homeostasis; 19. Excretion and osmoregulation; 20. Reproduction; 21. Growth and development; 22. Continuity of life; 23. Variation and genetics; 24. Application of genetics; 25. Evolution - history of life; 26. Mechanisms of speciation; Answers and discussion; Appendix 1. Biological chemistry; Appendix 2. Biological techniques; Appendix 3. Classification; Appendix 4. Nomenclature and units; Appendix 5. The geological time scale

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