Celias Secret: The Copenhagen Papers

Burke, David and Frayn, Michael

ISBN 10: 0571205704 / ISBN 13: 9780571205707

Published by Faber and Faber, 2001

About this Item

Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Damaged cover. The cover of is slightly damaged for instance a torn or bent corner. Grubby book may have mild dirt or some staining, mostly on the edges of pages.

Seller Inventory # CHL9983920

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Celias Secret: The Copenhagen Papers
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571205704
• ISBN 13: 9780571205707
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Used; Good

About this title

Synopsis

One day during the run of Michael Fryan's play Copenhagen, a curious letter arrived from a housewife in Chiswick. She enclosed a few faded pages of barely legible German which she thought might have some relevance to the mystery at the play's heart. They turned out to mark the start of a long and winding trail.

The subject of Copenhagen is the strange visit that the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, made to his former Danish colleague, Niels Bohr in 1941. The two old friends now found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and Heisenberg could not explain to Bohr that he was running the Nazis' secret atomic programme. His intentions have intrigued and baffled historians, and the hitherto unpublished German documents which Celia Rhys-Evans now began to send Michael Frayn cast a remarkable new light on certain aspects of the story.

The gradual emergence of these papers was followed with particularly close interest by the actor, David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, and who had happened to have a wide experience of documents of this sort. When it was all over David Burke and Michael Frayn sat down together, rather as Bohr and Heisenberg do in the play, to try to unravel the mystery, and, like Bohr and Heisenberg, to confront once again the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

About the Author

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies and Skios. His seventeen plays range from Noises Off, recently chosen as one of the nation's three favourite plays, to Copenhagen, which won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.