Peter J. Conradi

How are great turning points in history experienced by individuals? As Britain pulls away from Europe great British writers come together to give voice to their innermost feelings. These writers include novelists, writers of books for children, of comic books, humourists, historians, biographers, nature writers, film writers, travel writers, writers young and old and from an extraordinary range of backgrounds. Most are famous perhaps because they have won the Booker or other literary prizes, written bestsellers, changed the face of popular culture or sold millions of records. Others are not yet household names but write with depth of insight and feeling. There is some extraordinary writing in this book. Some of these pieces are expressions of love of particular places in Europe. Some are true stories, some nostalgic, some hopeful. Some are cries of pain. There are hilarious pieces. There are cries of pain and regret. Some pieces are quietly devastating. All are passionate. Conceived as a love letter to Europe, this book may also help reawaken love for Britain. It shows the unique richness and diversity of British cultures, a multitude of voices in harmony. Contributors include:Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Philip Ardagh, Jake Arnott, Patricia Atkinson, Paul Atterbury, Richard Beard, Mary Beard, Don Boyd, Melvyn Bragg, Gyles Brandreth, Kathleen Burke, James Buxton, Philip Carr, Brian Catling, Shami Chakrabarti, Chris Cleave, Mark Cocker, Peter Conradi , Heather Cooper, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Roger Crowley, David Crystal, William Dalrymple, Lindsey Davies, Margaret Drabble, Mark Ellen, Richard Evans, Michel Faber, Sebastian Faulks, Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Fox, James Fox, Neil Gaiman, Evelyn Glennie, James Hanning, Nick Hayes, Alan Hollinghurst, Gabby Hutchinson-Crouch, Will Hutton, Robert Irwin, Holly Johnson , Liane Jones, Ruth Jones, Sam Jordison, Kapka Kassabova, AL Kennedy, Hermione Lee, Prue Leith, Patrick Lenox, Roger Lewis, David Lindo, Penelope Lively, Beth Lync, Richard Mabey, Sue MacGregor, Ian Martin, Frank McDonough, Jonathan Meades, Andrew Miller, Deborah Moggach, Ben Moor, Alan Moore, Paul Morley, Jackie Morris, Charles Nicholl, Richard Overy, Chris Riddell, Adam Roberts, Tony Robinson, Lee Rourke, Sophie Sabbage, Marcus Sedgwick, Richard Shirreff, Paul Stanford, Isy Suttie, Sandi Toksvig, Colin Tudge, Ed Vulliamy, Anna Whitelock, Kate Williams, Michael Wood, Louisa Young

Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A. S. Byatt notes, she is "absolutely central to our culture". This biography reveals the women whose life, as a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, has significance for our age.

A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs is a wonderful and witty homage to man's most faithful friend.

Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War is a fascinating private memoir of one of the great women writers and thinkers of the 20th century and a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes during the Second World War.

Iris: A Life of Iris Murdoch is already regarded as the standard, authorized biography of one of the most important female novelists and thinkers of the twentieth century. Three years after her death, Iris Murdoch has begun to fascinate a whole new generation of readers, and a movie about her life was released in early 2002. In this critically acclaimed biography, Peter Conradi assesses the intellectual and cultural legacy of a remarkable woman "at the center of our culture" (A. S. Byatt). Published in hardcover as Iris Murdoch: A Life. "Conradi's infectious fascination with Murdoch and stirring insights into her work make this a superb cornerstone biography. (Booklist starred review) "A marvel of sympathy and intelligence."--Washington Post "Murdoch herself comes alive in all her contradictions."--Commonweal "A groundbreaking volume to which future biographers of Murdoch will be deeply indebted."--Choice

Published to coincide with his major new biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi’s acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated new edition, with a foreword by John Bayley. ‘Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the 20th-century’s most remarkable novelists and thinkers.’ John Bayley Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including ‘The Bell’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’, ‘The Black Prince’ and the Booker Prize-winning ‘The Sea, The Sea’. In ‘The Saint and the Artist’, the only full critical examination of Murdoch’s work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels, and argues that they should be read as serious entertainments and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.

How do you 'prepare' for bereavement? Religious faith can help, as can ritualised codes of dress and behaviour that recognise different stages of mourning. But many of us feel singularly unprepared when we lose someone. No one 'theory' can sooth the bereaved, precisely because grief so strips us naked and profoundly wounds us. Nothing pre-cooked helps. No quick fix, no one-shot deal. In this inspirational book, Peter J Conradi draws on literature, history and philosophy to present a broad array of different voices and perspectives on grief. His carefully chosen stories, excerpts and poems offer wisdom and consolation, but they also make us think, break down taboos and sometimes even find humour and light amidst the painful, bewildering reality of death. Everyone's experience of grief is different, but reading of the myriad different ways in which others have approached it can, while not necessarily easing our grief, certainly help us feel less alone.

An untold story of love, idealism and courage in the Second World War'A very moving account of the all-too-brief life of a warrior-poet' Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad'An elegy for a lost generation, and a fascinating social and political history of a peculiar period in our recent past ... it's impossible to put down Conradi's impressive and moving account of Thompson's life without a feeling of regret.' Mail on SundayModest, handsome and a fine poet, eccentric Englishman Frank Thompson made an unlikely soldier. Brother of E. P. Thompson and lover of Iris Murdoch, Frank was an intellectual idealist, a rare combination of brilliant mind and enormous heart. Of his wartime experiences, Frank wrote prodigiously. His letters, diaries and poetry still read fresh and intimate today - and it is from these that Peter J. Conradi brings vividly to life a brilliantly attractive and courageous personality. Aged just twenty-three, Frank was captured, tortured and executed in Bulgaria. A soldier of principle and integrity, he fought a poet's war; a very English hero from a very different era.

Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940’s – his first stories were greeted by Sean O’Faolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England – V S Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English Character, and recovering “broadness” without losing humanity. He has many faces as a writer. If he inherits the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, he also marries this to a recognisably modern anxiety and insecurity about the ‘self’. Wilson’s major books often concern ‘creative breakdown’: they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.

Radnorshire, a county rural and remote. The lives of its sparse population continue to be shaped by the wild landscape of valleys and mountains in ways that for Britain now lie in the past. Yet down the centuries Radnorshire has fascinated and inspired, as a place of contemplation, exploration, creation and retreat. In At the Bright Hem of God Peter J. Conradi examines both his own relationship with the place and responses to it by writers from Gerald of Wales, who passed through in 1176, to the present day. On the way he takes in fifteenth-century court poets; the metaphysicals Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne; the Romantic poets and Rousseau (who almost lived there and whose ideas did); diarist Francis Kilvert and his editor William Plomer; artist Eric Gill and poet David Jones; Bruce Chatwin, whose On the Black Hill is the most famous Radnorshire novel; and poets R. S. Thomas, Roland Mathias and Ruth Bidgood, the county’s current remembrancer. The result is an astonishing account, a trip across landscapes and borders - physical, emotional and intellectual - the culmination of over forty years of visiting and living there. Conradi’s perceptive narrative is complemented by superb ink drawings by the Radnorshire artist Simon Dorrell to produce a beautiful book, a love letter to a place still hidden from most of the country.

Peter J. Conradi’s memoir Family Business includes a cast of characters ranging from his European Jewish forebears who came to Britain in the Victorian era to influential novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, whose biography Conradi himself wrote. The arc of Conradi’s story travels, unusually, from the relative integration of his ancestors to his rebellion against this and his long association with Murdoch, another outsider in English society. Against the upwardly mobile successes of his immigrant ancestors – with their exotic, multifarious stories – and his relationship with his beloved grandmother came the more immediate dysfunction of his parents’ marriage. Young, clever, bisexual Peter became a ‘knight errant’ protecting his mother, and set a precedent repeated later in his friendship with Murdoch. Family Business is an enthralling book – a biographer’s autobiography – with numerous strands sensitively and thoughtfully explored, and including almost fifty previously unseen photographs.

Radnorshire, a county rural and remote. The lives of its sparse population continue to be shaped by the wild landscape of valleys and mountains in ways that for Britain now lie in the past. Yet down the centuries Radnorshire has fascinated and inspired, as a place of contemplation, exploration, creation and retreat. In At the Bright Hem of God Peter J. Conradi examines both his own relationship with the place and responses to it by writers from Gerald of Wales,who passed through in 1176, to the present day. On the way he takes in fifteenth century court poets; the metaphysicals Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne; the Romantic poets and Rousseau (who almost lived there and whose ideas did); diarist Francis Kilvert and his editor William Plomer; artist Eric Gill and poet David Jones; Bruce Chatwin, whose On the Black Hill is the most famous Radnorshire novel; and poets R. S. Thomas, Roland Mathias and Ruth Bidgood, the county's current remembrancer. The result is an astonishing account,a trip across landscapes and borders - physical, emotional and intellectual - the culmination of over forty years of visiting and living there. Conradi's perceptive narrative is complemented by superb ink drawings by the Radnorshire artist Simon Dorrell to produce a beautiful book, a love letter to a place still hidden from most of the country.