Huguenots

Huguenots - Reformed French Church - their principles delineated, their character illustrated, their sufferings and successes recorded is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1870.
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Art exploited as a mere pretext: that is the underlying theme of Conventional Weapons. I can think of no other novelist who has dealt with the subject so ruthlessly, with such skill and controlled imagination . . . Mr Brooke has ploughed his English corner of The Waste Land between the two world wars with a dexterity that compels our harrowed admiration

Vorwort
A searing portrait of the inter-war English middle-class by the exceptional writer and naturalist Jocelyn Brooke

Autorentext
Jocelyn Brooke was born in 1908 on the south coast and educated at Bedales and Worcester College, Oxford. He worked in London for a while, then in the family wine-merchants in Folkestone, Kent. In 1939, Brooke enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and reenlisted after the war as a Regular. The critical success of The Military Orchid (1948), the first volume of his autobiographical Orchid trilogy, provided the opportunity to buy himself out, and he immediately settled down to write, publishing some fifteen titles between 1948 and 1955, including the successive volumes of the trilogy, A Mine of Serpents (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950). His other published work includes two volumes of poetry, the novels The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) and The Dog at Clambercrown (1955), as well as some technical works on botany. A perceptive reviewer, Brooke wrote critiques of Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, Ronald Firbank, and John Betjeman. He also introduced and edited the journals and published works of Denton Welch. Jocelyn Brooke died in 1966.

Zusammenfassung

Brittle, effeminate and perennially untalented, Nigel Tuffnell-Greene has little in common with his high-achieving and ultra-masculine elder brother, Geoffrey, whom he worships and detests hating him with a passion almost indistinguishable from love.

In Conventional Weapons the reader is introduced to a stratum of English middle-class society before and after World War II as the divergent paths of the two brothers unfold. Geoffrey joins the army, marries and sets up in business, but eventually ends up an exile in Malta; Nigel drifts into a seedy London life of drinking, parties and half-hearted gay liaisons, and finds some fame as an artist and novelist.

With an astonishing appreciation of their deeper character traits, which remain unspoken and barely revealed, Brooke explores the shared fragility beneath the surface of these seemingly polarised lives. Beautiful, subtle and immensely powerful, his impeccable prose is never better than in this late novel.

'One of the most interesting and talented of contemporary writers' Anthony Powell

'He is subtle as the devil' John Betjeman

'Mr Brooke has ploughed his English corner of The Waste Land between the two world wars with a dexterity that compels our harrowed admiration' Harold Acton