*FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Aldous (Gus) Cotton—the asthmatic hero of Ferdinand Mount's critically acclaimed series A Chronicle of Modern Twilight.
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- Ferdinand Mount is the most supple and clear-sighted novelist I can name
- THE MAN WHO RODE AMPERSAND by Ferdinand Mount | Kirkus Reviews
It includes the real-life letters of Wm and Rosalie and Jefferson, some never published before. It also incidentally reveals the truth about the Third President and Sally Hemings.
Heads You Win is a tragicomedy of second chances. After taking early retirement, Gus Cotton is surprised to find himself persuaded by two old friends - a disgraced wheeler-dealer and a convicted drug smuggler - into taking on the City by launching the greatest headhunting company of all time. Added to this mix, the fourth partner in their venture is a beautiful young woman with an alcoholic past. In this, the final volume of his Chronicle of Modern Twilight series, Ferdinand Mount has created a poignant and hilariously funny exploration of the concept that none of us is beyond redemption.
Ferdinand Mount has been editor of the Times Literary Supplement since Umbrella, the first of his Tales of History and Imagination, was described by the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson as 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. He is also well known as a political columnist and essayist and has written several works of non-fiction including The Subversive Family and The British Constitution Now. We use cookies on this site and by continuing to browse it you agree to us sending you cookies.
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Gifts and box sets Penguin Shop Flipper gift picker. For the young and young at heart. In this book the former head of Mrs Thatcher's policy unit looks at the state of the British Constitution at a crucial time in its history, arguing that recent years have seen an increased willingness to monitor itself on the part of the Establishment, but that more audacious reforms are needed to restore full confidence in Parliament, government and the legal system. We should have awakened to the sun streaming in from across the valley, but this is not a story about things as they should be, and it was a dark blustery morning, blasting the blossom off the may.
Only in the shelter of the high hedgerows down in the lanes streaked with red mud was there ant escape from the wind and the rain.
Just as we were putting on our boots, I pinned down the unidentified fear of the night before. I had slept without my asthma pillow. It was not the first time. But this was the first time I had slept without it and not properly noticed until the morning after.
Ferdinand Mount is the most supple and clear-sighted novelist I can name
This must, I though, be love. What was being celebrated, it became increasingly clear, was not merely the life of a distinguished ornament of the modern literary scene, but the triumph - or perhaps only the survival - of a particular brand of post-war English writing. This is not a complaint about Ishiguro, Swift, McEwan or Rushdie, the four Booker winners seen conferring over the buffet; simply an acknowledgment that in the reputation-brokering that has accompanied the progress of the British novel over the past 20 years, a certain kind of writing has lost out in favour of another.
The kind that lost out, it is fair to say, was the melancholic-humorous novel of English decline, the novel of ironic glances backward, of suppressed diminuendos; the kind of book that Anthony Powell used to write, that A N Wilson still does, and of which Ferdinand Mount is an absolutely classic contemporary exponent. No consideration of Mount's Chronicle of Modern Twilight - a series of loosely linked novels this is the fifth going back as far as The Man Who Rode Ampersand - can altogether ignore the Powell connection.
This is ancestral as well as stylistic: Powell, as it happens, was Mount's uncle by marriage.
- The Cat & The Comedian.
- US Army, Technical Manual, TM 55-4920-378-14&P, TESTER, PITOT AND STATIC SYSTEM, (MFR. PART NO. TPS-.
- Ephesians (Ironside Expository Commentaries).
- Ferdinand Mount is the most supple and clear-sighted novelist I can name | The Spectator.
- Chinas Oil Industry and Market (Elsevier Global Energy Policy and Economics Series);
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Mount specialises, too, in the unheralded reappearance: Dr Maintenon-Smith from the earlier novels, here found working on a fog-bound hospital ship, and Gerald Moonman, editor of the satirical magazine Frag a dead ringer for Private Eye , re-emerging to go off with his brother's wife. Essentially, Fairness is the story of an unrequited love affair, set against several decades of post-war English history. Blonde, intense Helen, whom Gus first encounters on a rain-swept Normandy beach in the early s and whom he marks down as a repository for moral seriousness, turns out to be a talismanic figure in his life.
Whether she is seen at her parents' home on "Minnow Island", downriver from Teddington, squired to a down-at-heel motorists' club off Regent Street by Bobs, Gerald's younger brother, or found working for a dodgy South African mining enterprise, Helen's capacity to hurt, mystify and intrigue is a constant.
THE MAN WHO RODE AMPERSAND by Ferdinand Mount | Kirkus Reviews
Eternally out of reach, capable of contracting the most bizarre alliances, half-confidential, half-aloof, Helen is the hinge on which the novel turns. She picks up the other characters - including Dido Wilmot, the outsized American businessman, and his predatory wife - but always manages to preserve herself intact amid a mounting tide of personal and historical wreckage. Gus and Helen's final encounter takes place at a child-abuse inquiry in the late s, where he is the secretary and she a social-worker witness.
However deviously plotted and neatly, or rather ambiguously, resolved - even the title contrives to marry a philosophical abstract with the name of the children's home - Fairness brings off many of its effects through sheer atmospherics.