We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as ‘Byr – ‘ when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron’s, and put on his specs.
It is July 1981, and Alan Bates succumbs to a fit of nerves as he and Frederic Raphael attempt to carry off an underrehearsed performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This wry glimpse behind the scenes of the London literary scene sits, in Raphael’s notebooks, amid clear-eyed analysis of the riots and social unrest then erupting in Britain’s cities under Margaret Thatcher’s government. Compulsively readable, by turns mischievous and coruscating, this latest volume of Raphael’s reflections casts light on a period that saw the beginnings of a decisive shift in British and American culture. Along the way, there are finely incised pen-portraits of public figures ranging from Shirley Conran to Peter Sellers and from Robert Redford to Mary Whitehouse.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written, it combines rueful self-analysis with perceptive and, one suspects, all too accurate character assessments of well-known contemporaries, together with musings on Lord Byron, drama in ancient Greece and the state of the nation under Thatcher. –Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review
This is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Diaries promise indiscretions, and the joy of gossip… Is it right to invoke Pepys or Evelyn? When Personal Terms have concluded they will prove to be Raphael’s lasting work, so perhaps it is. –Wynn Wheldon, Spectator
A beguiling modern classic. –William Boyd, Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Frederic Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931 and educated at Charterhouse and St John’s College, Cambridge. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964. His novels include The Glittering Prizes (1976), Coast to Coast (1998) and Fame and Fortune (2007); he has also written short stories and biographies of Somerset Maugham and Byron. Frederic Raphael is a leading screenwriter, whose work includes the Academy Award-winning Darling (1965), Two for the Road (1967), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut. The first volume of Personal Terms was published by Carcanet in 2001, followed by Rough Copy (2004), Cuts and Bruises (2006), Ticks and Crosses (2008), Ifs and Buts (2011) and There and Then in 2013.
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