Necessity of Anti-semitism - Hardcover

Raphael, Frederic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857543246 ISBN 13: 9781857543247

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, 1997

Synopsis

The essays and causeries gathered in this collection of Frederic Raphael's provocative and corrective `occasional writings' are not all on Jewish themes. But the author is undeniably a Jew, a sceptical Jew of Anglo-American parents and largely European experience and habit. He is a liberal, middle-class novelist and screen-writer for whom modern literary and social history is a puzzlement demanding close analytical attention. As the title, with its wry allusion to Shelley, suggests, it is impossible to forget the past. Raphael is, after all, an accomplished classicist. But how shall we make `reasonable' sense of a world that has proven and proves unreasonable time after time? By close attention to facts and what they can mean, to the written word and what it can mean and conceal; by a refusal to acquiesce in inhumanity. `Art', he declares, `is the only means by which we can combine truth with a certain hope.' The essays, in a wonderfully readable and persuasive way, seek to indicate how a humane secular society can and must retain its roots in what it has perforce to transcend.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1931, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964. The first of his numerous novels was published in 1956; his most recent, Coast to Coast, is published by Orion. He adapted The Glittering Prizes (1976) and After the War (1988) for television. He has written stories, biographies of Somerset Maugham and Byron, and screenplays, including the Academy Award-winning Darling (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). He was the screenwriter for Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857543246
• ISBN 13: 9781857543247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256