John Lucas

'Somewhere in the world there may be a noisier street than Acharnon Street; but I hope not.' 92 Acharnon Street is a loving portrait of Athens in all its dusty, dirty, trafficridden reality, complete with bars, prostitutes, corruption and imperious bureaucrats. This is a book about Greeks not just Greece, in all their rich and confusing humanity.

Now available in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death, this biography corrects many of the myths surrounding the often controversial Thomas Beecham. Thomas Beecham was one of Britain's greatest conductors of orchestral music and opera as well as an entrepreneur and impresario of exceptional energy and brilliant wit. This acclaimed biography places him - musically, politicallyand socially - in the troubled times in which he lived and corrects the stories and myths, many of them Beecham's own making, that have grown up around this uniquely gifted and controversial figure. Drawing upon extensive research, Lucas presents new material on his early years, his complicated private life, his father's catastrophic attempt to buy a large part of Covent Garden - which brought the family to its knees financially - and the orchestras andopera companies that Beecham founded. New light is shed on his visits to Nazi Germany and his view of its leaders, as well as the much misunderstood and previously unchronicled years of the Second World War, which he spent in Australia and America. Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music will remain the standard biography for years to come. JOHN LUCAS was on the staff of the Observer for 25 years, completed Peter Heyworth's monumentalbiography of Otto Klemperer, wrote Genius of Valhalla, the biography of Reginald Goodall, and is responsible for the current entries on Beecham and Klemperer in the New Grove .

A Memoir of England in the 1950s.

The life of enigmatic Wagner conductor, Reginald Goodall, by the author of the acclaimed Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, newly available in paperback. When Sir Reginald Goodall died in 1990, at the age of 88, he had already acquired cult status and was considered one of the greatest Wagner conductors of our times. Although he had conducted the première of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes in 1945 and was admired by Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer, he suffered years of neglect until his triumphant return to conduct Die Meistersinger at Sadler's Wells in 1968. John Lucas, author of theacclaimed Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, examines the mysteries of Goodall's early career, his Mosleyite sympathies, his remarkable late flowering and the fame of his last 20 years. Drawing upon letters and diaries as well as extensive interviews with friends and colleagues, Lucas pieces together the life of this enigmatic, self-effacing figure - a great Wagner conductor in a tradition stretching back through Knappertsbusch and Karl Muckto Hans Richter. Previously available as Reggie: The Life of Reginald Goodall - now available for the first time in paperback with a new Preface and Introduction. Published in association with the Peter Moores Foundation.

John Lucas' account of the play considers the significance of Shakespeare's decision to break with the expectations of the Jacobean stage, of his treatment of sexual jealousy, of the contrasting (and complementary) worlds of court and country, and of the ways in which women successfully oppose male power. He also relates the play to a number of others in the canon in order to identify what is uniquely wonderful about The Winter's Tale. The Winter's Tale is a play in which Shakespeare chooses to flout the laws of dra matic probability. Not only are its two halves separated by a gap of 16 years, a man is eaten by a bear, a baby is miraculously saved from death by drowning, a statue no less miraculously comes to life. It is also a play which seems destined for a tragic outcome and yet which ends in reconciliation, in love restored, in a king's mad jealousy healed. Perhaps most importantly, in The Winter's Tale women become the active agents of good rather than the passive sufferers to which conventional role they seem condemned at the play's outset.

This study, while surveying all of Robert Browning's non-dramatic work, pays particular attention to the most original and influential books of his career - "Men and Women" and "Dramatis Personae". It shows how Browning's work retains its contemporary interest.

Blending fiction, biography and social history in order to tell the story of his grandfather Horace Kelly, headteacher of a succession of elementary schools in impoverished areas of London, John Lucas's book is a study of one man and a period when England was changed drastically and forever.