Kirjahaku

* Fascinating and perceptive new biography of one of the most brilliant writers of his age: novelist, essayist and born-again mystic Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), author of BRAVE NEW WORLD and EYELESS IN GAZA

This gripping biography of the great Czech novelist, diarist and short story writer chronicles Kafka's entire (if tragically curtailed) life (1883-1924), but it focuses upon the writer's relationship to his father and his inheritance as a member of the Jewish mercantile bourgeoisie in Prague. Born into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1919 yet through his work he is one of the most modern of writers. While previous works have concentrated on Kafka and his women, Nicholas Murray will concentrate on his extraordinary relationship with his father which found its most eloquent literary expression in the story 'The Judgement' written in 1912 when Kafka was twenty-nine:in a reverse Oedipal move, the father condemns his son to death by drowning. This work is essential for an understanding of the intensely private and complex Kafka and the kind of writer he turned out to be - the creator in THE CASTLE, THE TRIAL and METAMORPHOSIS (the dazzling short story whose hero wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect) of some of the defining literature of the 20th century.

In the early 19th century there was a huge surge forward in travel of all kinds. Queen Victoria's accession in 1837 came barely a year after John Murray's first guidebook was published. Then in 1838 Bradshaw's famous portable railway timetable appeared. In 1841 Thomas Cook, the world's first travel agent, organised its first tour (from London to Leicester and back by train). The age of mass tourism had arrived. Side by side with it another phenomenom began to develop: exploration to wilder shores and uncharted lands. This is the focus of Nicholas Murray's fascinating book which draws upon the extraordinary stories of Livingstone's journey across Africa; Burton and Speke reaching Lake Tanganyika; John Stuart crossing Australia from south to north; Livingstone reaching the Zambezi; Richard Burton's travels across Arabia, and countless others' extraordinary and brave expeditions.

The poetry that emerged from the trenches of WWI is a remarkable body of work, at once political manifesto and literary beacon for the twentieth century. In this passionate recreation of the lives of the greatest poets to come out of the conflict, Nicholas Murray brilliantly reveals the men themselves as well as the struggle of the artist to live fully and to bear witness in the annihilating squalor of battle.Bringing into sharp focus the human detail of each life, using journals, letters and literary archives, Murray brings to life the men's indissoluble comradeship, their complex sexual mores and their extraordinary courage. Poignant, vivid and unfailingly intelligent, Nicholas Murray's study offers new and finely tuned insight into the - often devastatingly brief - lives of a remarkable generation of men.

Nicholas Murray's The Rocky Road to the Great War examines the evolution of field fortification theory and practice between 1877 and 1914. The technical and intellectual developments during this period were critical to the nature of the First World War. It is well known that the technology of the defensive (machine guns, barbed wire, and artillery) had become much more powerful in the decades prior to 1914. The challenge this combination of enhanced defensive technology presented to the offensive is familiar to us today.What is less well known is the evolution in the design of field fortifications, from above to below ground, which massively enhanced the power of the new defensive technology. Study of the evolution of field fortification construction has largely been neglected despite the fact that the battlefield landscape of the First World War, indeed industrial warfare in the twentieth century, owes its existence to the changes that occurred therein. It was the combination of new technology and new types of field fortification that was to reach a bloody dénouement in the Great War.Based largely on primary sources—including French, British, Austrian, and American military attaché reports—Murray's enlightening study is unique in defining, fully examining, and contextualizing the theories and construction of field fortifications before World War I.

Borders are a huge topic today, part of our zeitgeist. What do they mean? How do we define them? In Crossings Nicholas Murray considers the borders hehas confronted - geographic, cultural, linguistic, social, class, religious, sexual - and reflects on the influence of borders on how we think of ourselves and others, in his typically dynamic style.