George Mackay Brown0.0 These two long stories are set, like most of George Mackay Brown's work, in Orkney and in a period, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the pattern of island life, little changed since Viking times, was beginning to be threatened. "The Golden Bird" tells the story of the slow decline of an island community: a scattered village dependant on the sea for its livelihood and at risk from it, a place subject to the peculiar tensions of isolation and the unsettling influence of new values. "The Life and Death of John Voe" looks at the life of a typical young Orkney man: after whaling and sailing and gold-mining he comes home to devote the rest of his days to a beautiful country girl. These stories are the creation of a very rich imagination, of a practised and skilful writer, but they also have the power and simplicity of the traditional ballad. They will delight Mackay Brown's fans.
Рут Дадли Эдвардс0.0 Victor Gollancz was a teacher, publisher, author and campaigner who spent his life passionately trying to make people see the truth as he saw it. If it's as a publisher that he is remembered above all, nonetheless in many ways he epitomised the social conscience of the mid-twentieth century: he founded the Left Book Club, Save Europe Now and the Campaign Against Capital Punishment. For this biography, first published in 1987, Ruth Dudley Edwards had access to all the Gollancz family and firm papers, and produced an honest, searching work which not only reveals an extraordinary man but throws light on many of the political and social events of his times.
'Frequently gripping and always readable.' John Gross, Observer
'Consistently enthralling and a brilliant achievement.' Hilary Rubinstein, Spectator
'One of the fullest and richest portraits of a contemporary individual we have had.' Anthony Curtis, Financial Times
'I would trust anyone's life to Ruth Dudley Edwards.' Terence De Vere White, Irish Times
