Alan Clark: A Life in his Own Words

Author: Alan Clark
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780220359
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 841

Book Description
Some of the most talked about books of recent years, Alan Clark's diaries provide a witty and irreverant insider's account of political life in Britain. Now in one volume. 'From the moment the first scabrous and brilliant volume was published, people wanted more. Now they have it and they will not be disappointed... These diaries are not wonderful simply because they show a politician unafraid to say what he thinks, and refusing to suck up to those whom he represents. They are great because they show all sides of a man who was, within his complex personality, arrogant, sensitive, loyal, unfaithful, patriotic, selfish, selfless, and - at all times - completely Technicolour' Simon Heffner, DAILY MAIL

Alan Clark

Author: Ion Trewin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780753827062
Category : Diarists
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Celebrated diarist, famous womaniser, Tory MP and controversial minister - a castle-owning toff and lecherous cad to some, to others a colourful and life-enhancing figure - Alan Clark was politically incorrect before the term was invented. He is best remembered for his sensational diaries - but what of the man? Alan Clark rarely spoke about his upbringing, even to his family. Was it as unhappy as he hinted? Ion Trewin has had unrestricted access to extensive family papers (including twenty years of unpublished diaries). He has talked to politicians, to those who knew him at the prep school which burnt down, to friends at Eton and Oxford, and to some of the many women he found impossible to resist despite a loving marriage of forty-one years. From his struggles to teach himself to write to formidable historian and diarist, from his enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher to the 'drunk at the Commons dispatch box' affair, ALAN CLARK THE BIOGRAPHY is a revealing and absorbing account of a remarkable and unforgettable man.

Diaries

Author: Alan Clark
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780221282
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
The first volume of the 20th century's most phenomenally successful diaries, published alongside first paperback of THE LAST DIARIES. INTO POLITICS begins in 1973 with Clark's selection as Tory candidate for Nancy Astor's old seat in Plymouth (rival candidates included future Conservative luminaries Michael Howard and Norman Fowler). Alan Clark describes his election to the Commons in the 1974 general election; his years as a backbencher coincide with Edward Heath as PM, his downfall and the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. This volume ends with the inside story of the Falklands War. In his private life Alan and his wife Jane and their two young sons take over Saltwood Castle, previously the home of his father Kenneth (Civilisation) Clark. His enthusiasms for the estate, skiing, fast cars and girls are never far away.

The Assassin's Cloak

Author: Irene Taylor
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1838852921
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 960

Book Description
'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen', wrote William Soutar in 1934. But a diary is also a place for recording everyday thoughts and special occasions, private fears and hopeful dreams. The Assassin's Cloak gathers together some of the most entertaining and inspiring entries for each day of the year, as writers ranging from Queen Victoria to Andy Warhol, Samuel Pepys to Adrian Mole, pen their musings on the historic and the mundane. Spanning centuries and international in scope, this peerless anthology pays tribute to a genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. This new updated edition is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication.

Aces High

Author: Alan Clark
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1448201519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
Aces High is the vivid chronicle of aerial warfare over the Western Front in World War One and the personalities that characterised the era. These were the airmen who became legends in their own lifetimes: Albert Ball, Manfred von Richthofen (also known as the Red Baron), Mick Mannock, René Fonck and Georges Guynemer. The key to maintaining military superiority was by perfecting the aeroplane, which meant many of these pilots were flying dangerous, untested machines. From the birth of powered flight for reconnaissance purposes to the development of strategic bombing and the creation of the Royal Air Force in 1918, this was as much a war of technological advances as it was of skill and endurance.

The Last Diaries

Author: Alan Clark
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780221304
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
'With his Diaries, he has written himself into the life of our times with a panache and candour that ranks him next to Boswell or Pepys' The Times The first two volumes of Alan Clark's were irresistible, irreverent, infamous, outrageous. This last volume is a fitting finale to the work of a man who has been described as 'the best diarist of his century'. The third volume begins in 1991 with Alan Clark contemplating quitting as an MP. Life at Saltwood Castle, his home, hangs heavy; then comes the Scott inquiry and the Matrix Churchill affair. Publication of the first volume of the Diaries leads 'the coven', a family of former girlfriends, to sell their story to the NEWS OF THE WORLD. This volume follows his attempts to return to Westminster, an affair that threatens his marriage, and closes with the tragedy of his final months when he is diagnosed with a brain tumour, but keeps his diary until he can no longer focus on the page.

A Parliament of Crows

Author: Alan M. Clark
Publisher: IFD Publishing
ISBN: 9780998846668
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Always in mourning clothes, secretive, devious, and deadly, the three Mortlow sisters might appear to be long lost members of the Addams Family or characters drawn by Edward Gorey. But their depiction is inspired by the Wardlaw sisters, actual criminals from history. The story of their lives and crimes is the very definition of Southern Gothic.

Writing Early American History

Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812219104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
How is American history written? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alan Taylor answers this question in this collection of his essays from The New Republic, where he explores the writing of early American history.

Kenneth Clark

Author: James Stourton
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 038535116X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 641

Book Description
The definitive biography of this brilliant polymath--director of the National Gallery, author, patron of the arts, social lion, and singular pioneer of television--that also tells the story of the arts in the twentieth century through his astonishing life. Kenneth Clark's thirteen-part 1969 television series, Civilisation, established him as a globally admired figure. Clark was prescient in making this series: the upheavals of the century, the Cold War among others, convinced him of the power of barbarism and the fragility of culture. He would burnish his image with two memoirs that artfully omitted the more complicated details of his life. Now, drawing on a vast, previously unseen archive, James Stourton reveals the formidable intellect and the private man behind the figure who effortlessly dominated the art world for more than half a century: his privileged upbringing, his interest in art history beginning at Oxford, his remarkable early successes. At 27 he was keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean in Oxford and at 29, the youngest director of The National Gallery. During the war he arranged for its entire collection to be hidden in slate mines in Wales and organized packed concerts of classical music at the Gallery to keep up the spirits of Londoners during the bombing. WWII helped shape his belief that art should be brought to the widest audience, a social and moral position that would inform the rest of his career. Television became a means for this message when he was appointed the first chairman of the Independent Television Authority. Stourton reveals the tortuous state of his marriage during and after the war, his wife's alcoholism, and the aspects of his own nature that he worked to keep hidden. A superb work of biography, Kenneth Clark is a revelation of its remarkable subject.

Keeping On Keeping On

Author: Alan Bennett
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374716978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 680

Book Description
One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year: “Humorous, surprising, disarmingly human” essays and comic pieces from one of England’s national treasures (The Washington Post Book World). A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year A Lambda Literary Award finalist Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England’s best-known literary figures, Keeping On Keeping On contains Tony Award–winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and actor Alan Bennett’s diaries from 2005 to 2015—with everything from his much celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews—reflecting on a decade that saw four major theater premieres and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. This entertaining chronicle of a life in letters comes from a “singular voice [with] a highly tuned ironic wit—his special brand of gentleness laced with arsenic” (The New York Times Book Review). “Part of the pleasure of his diaries is the sense that [Bennett] tells them things he would never say out loud.” —The New York Review of Books “Consistently funny and touching.” —The Telegraph