With a glee in upending pretense that rivals the works of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh, Powell attacks artistic pretension, aristocratic jadedness, and the dark side of the glamorous life.Afternoon Men provides an important perspective on the development of one of this century's great satirists.

    It had its differences; its ice goblins, its curious furry lorrin, its thickening water, and its unearthly tides, but for a young man like Alika-Drove thinking of a vacation by the sea these oddities were the norm.But this vacation was different. Rax was coming into the ascendant and Rax, that cold second sun, was the equivalent of evil, of Satan and of Hell. And as its time drew near everything began to get warped and sinister...until for Alika-Drove it would be either the harsh brutal end of his innocence or the end of his world forever.

    Police sub-inspector Swami has lost his job after suffering a stroke while beating up a Very Guilty Suspect. He can no longer talk properly, command the respect of his community, or give his six daughters the bankrupting dowries they deserve--and his wife is obsessed with securing the Most Expensive Husbands in India. No wonder Swami has lost his pride and wants to kill himself using only a puncture repair kit. Surely a man in these circumstances has good reason to feel cursed when a white man falls out of the sky and lands on him in a busy street, dying in front of his eyes and making him a laughing stock. But as further strange incidents occur, Swami's hometown starts to believe he is walking with God, and life becomes easier...

    TROPIC OF RUISLIP is a sage for life on a modern executive housing estate, seething with the fears, snobbereis, frustrations and lusts of well-heeled young couples trundling uneasily towards middle age.

    Staying with his parents-in-law at their house in Norfolk, he reads Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, and this precipitates a mid-life crisis. What has happened to his youthful ideals to do good in the world? What has happened that has made his marriage go stale? It is the period of strikes, political crisis and the `three-day week’: Strickland determines to stand as a Labour MP. His ambition is mocked by his wife and, blaming her for his life’s stagnation, he starts an affair with another woman.

    Elliott Wiener, an unscrupulous historian, tracks down Warren Harding's ancient mistress in a crumbling Los Angeles mansion and schemes to get the president's love letters.

    The dying Freud hustled out of Vienna into exileA Broadway musical on the subject of Trotsky in New YorkThe last throes of the planet Earth in AD 2000These are all items onThe End of the World NewsPsychoanalysis, international socialism and The End - three themes, three stories - outrageously counterpointed into trinity, in a novel stuffed with verbal pyrotechnics, amazing sleights of fantasy, and tantalizing jokes, and which is crowned by a brilliant, unexpected, out-of-this-world finale - all written by one novelist at the height of his powers.

    Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team and stalwart of the Kardomah coffee bar, his game improves.

    "The English are dying too much," the city's police chief observes. And members of the foreign community in this quaint Italian backwater, both English and American, are indeed dying at an alarming rate and in an extraordinary variety of ingenious and horrible ways.      With the local authorities out of their depth, the distinguished resident Robert Browning launches his own private investigation, aided and abetted by an expatriot Robert Booth. Unfortunately, their amateur sleuthing is hampered by the fact that each of their suspects becomes the next victim in a series of murders orchestrated by a killer with a taste for poetic justice. A Rich Full Death features characters both historical and imaginary, ranging from an enticing servant girl to Mr. Browning's consumptive, world-famous wife, Elizabeth Barrett, in a tale lush with period detail, intricately plotted, and with a truly astonishing final twist.

    As they explore the city of their present day, they also explore its recent past and its forgotten people. Through the lives of those on the fringe of society, we learn what it is like - and what it has always been like - to live in the great, sprawling, polyphonic, multicoloured capital.

    Joining Master Will in Brahms and Simon's comic mayhem are all the usual Elizabethan suspects, though we see them in a most unusual, and hilarious, light: Francis Bacon, for example, scheming for possession of one of the beds in which the Queen has slept; and Walter Raleigh, staging an elaborate feast at which England's great will have their first taste of the mysterious Potato. And then there's Viola Compton, stage-struck Maid of Honour, who disguises herself as a boy-player and catches the eye of the playwright himself. Has Will found the muse he needs? Is Shakespeare in love?With an Introduction by Ned Sherrin.

    L. Carr, published in 1972. The novel tells the story mostly in the form of a school log book kept by George Harpole, temporary Head Teacher of the Church of England primary school of "Tampling St. Nicholas". Like all of Carr's novels, it is grounded in personal experience. Carr was a Primary School teacher for almost 40 years, including 15 years spent as Head Teacher.

    When her amazing singing voice wins her a talent show at the tender age of thirteen, she is whisked off to London and instant stardom. But even as Maria is celebrating her greatest success, she is waging a hidden battle against her own body, and becoming in the process a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity. Can she be saved by love? Or will she be consumed by an obsessive celebrity culture, family lies, and by her number-one fan? This stunning novel is a rich portrait of an immigrant community and a tragic tale of the hidden costs of celebrity.

    Battling the sea and struggling against each other as the dreaded williwaw approaches, strikes, and subsides, the men reveal the storms within their souls, stark, fierce, and compelling. And pervading all is the grim atmosphere, set down with a mastery of description, of the desolate Arctic and the harsh destructive storm.

    Bates wrote after the second world war, and it was his own favourite among his Northamptonshire novels. The Northants setting becomes the background both ugly and beautiful for the story of a young girl, the daughter of a decaying aristocratic household, and her lovers, of which the most important is the narrator himself.Published in 1952, it is essentially an autobiographical novel, and, though much of his fiction reflects his own life and background, this probably contains more than in any other piece of fiction – That may explain why it is such a satisfying book. Bates spent a brief time as a reporter on the Northamptonshire Chronicle, and there are other echoes of the author’s personal experiences here in the character of the narrator, Richardson. Lydia, it seems, is based on, or was inspired by, a young lady he once glimpsed on Rushden railway station – "a tallish, dark, proud, aloof young girl in a black cloak lined with scarlet". Lydia in the story is the sheltered and selfish Aspen daughter, and the novel chronicles her affairs with Richardson and two of the other young men. It has been described as a novel of "a young man's struggle to understand and resolve himself to a formidable world of change and uncertainty”, and the novel ends in his committing himself to Lydia in a much more mature and lasting way than he could have done at the beginning of the story. The novel was serialised on television in 1976.