Frank Kermode

Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys on dissolute nobility - using charm to tempt the weak into making foolish investments in his dubious schemes. Persuaded to put money into a notional plot to run a railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, the capricious gambler Felix Carbury soon becomes one of his victims. But as Melmotte climbs higher in society, his web of deceit - which also draws in characters as diverse as his own...

"While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T.S. Eliot finished what would become the definitive poem of the modern condition, and one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through...

Tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. While at Oxford, Charles Ryder meets boyish, flamboyant Sebastian Flyte, who introduces Charles to a charmed and glamorous way of life that continues until Sebastian's health deteriorates.

This significant exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conception of chaos and crisis brings highly concentrated insights to bear upon some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Mr. Kermode ranges through the works of writers from Plato to Sorokin, showing how men have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. -- back cover.

"This book presents a historical overview of The Tempest in performance, recommends film versions, takes a detailed look at specific productions and includes interviews with three leading directors - Peter Brook, Sam Mendes and Rupert Goold - so that we may get a sense of the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible, a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made 'our contemporary' four centuries after...