10% off all books and free delivery over £50
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

There and Then VI

View All Editions (1)

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

There and Then VI Synopsis

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, and put on his specs.
It is July 1981, and Alan Bates succumbs to a fit of nerves as he and Frederic Raphael attempt to carry off an underrehearsed performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This wry glimpse behind the scenes of the London literary scene sits, in Raphael's notebooks, amid clear-eyed analysis of the riots and social unrest then erupting in Britain's cities under Margaret Thatcher's government. Compulsively readable, by turns mischievous and coruscating, this latest volume of Raphael's reflections casts light on a period that saw the beginnings of a decisive shift in British and American culture. Along the way, there are finely incised pen-portraits of public figures ranging from Shirley Conran to Peter Sellers and from Robert Redford to Mary Whitehouse.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9781847771407
Publication date:
Author: Frederic Raphael
Publisher: Lives and Letters an imprint of Carcanet Press
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 216 pages
Series: Personal Terms
Genres: Diaries, letters and journals
Literary essays