Henry Green

Dazzling, daring and full of original insight and wit, Henry Green offers a unique view of a class-ridden Britain enduring both war and its aftermath.

When the war breaks out, Rose, a well-to-do widower with a young son, Christopher, volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, and is trained under a professional fire officer, Pye.

Henry Green wrote his autobiography in 1940, aged only thirty-five, because he was convinced he wouldn't survive the war.

Back is, according to Jeremy Treglown in his introduction, "Henry Green's most extended attempt to plumb the world of the hunted - and haunted". First published in 1946, it has indeed remained one of Green's most haunting, elegiac novels and one of the most enduring to have focused on the individual human tragedy of the war.

Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker. One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball, as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.

Edited by the author's grandson, the novelist Matthew Yorke, and with an Introduction by John Updike, this book is an excellent selection of Henry Green's uncollected writings. It includes a number of outstanding stories never previously published, written during the '20s and '30s ("Bees", "Saturday", "Excursion", and the remarkable "Mood" among them). It contains a highly entertaining account of Green's service in the London Fire Brigade during the War; a short play written in the 1950s; and a selection of his journalism, including revelatory articles about the craft of writing, a marvellous evocation of Venice, a description of falling in love, reviews which illuminate his literary enthusiasm and the entertaining interview with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. It is rounded off with a biographical memoir by Green's son, Sebastian Yorke. Fascinating and invaluable as an introduction to Green, Surviving casts new light on his work and illustrates the many facets of this exceptional writer, one of the two most important English novelists of his time.

TAYLORThese 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.

One of his most admired works, LOVING describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe;

"The simple and close imitation of a Greek original was not unusual with Alciati. He took the thoughts or even the exact expressions of ancient authors, and out of them fashioned what for the time suited his purpose." -Henry Green, Andrea Alciati and his Books of Emblems (1872) Andrea Alciati and his Books of Emblems (1872) by Henry Green is a compilation of information about one of the most influential individuals and lawyers of the 16th and 17th century. Alciati's identification and explanation of emblems was used extensively as a reference for scholars interpreting art and literature. This book provides a thorough biography of Alciati, examples of the emblems he studied, and a bibliography of the multiple editions of Alciati's landmark book. Alciati's work transcends time as it explains many common emblems such as the reason why lions are placed at the front of a government building. Any art lover or student of history will enjoy this engaging text.

In the years following the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews became refugees fleeing their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. State-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest brought an abrupt end to these once vibrant communities, scattering their members to the four corners of the earth. Their stories are mostly untold. Sephardi Voices: The Forgotten Exodus of the Arab Jews is a window into the experiences of these communities and their stories of survival. Through gripping first-hand accounts and stunning portrait and documentary photography, we hear on-the-ground stories of pogroms in Libya and Egypt, the burning of synagogues in Syria, the terrible Farhud in Iraq, families escaping via the great airlifts of the Magic Carpet and Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, husbands smuggled in carpets into Iran in search of wives. The authors also provide crucial historical background for these events, as well as updates on the lives of some of these Sephardi Jews who have gone on to rebuild fortunes in London and New York, write novels, and win Nobel Prizes. Sephardi Voices is at once a wide-ranging and intimate story of a large-scale catastrophe and a portrait of the vulnerability of the passage of time.