Benjamin Taylor – författare

'Magnificent... Her famous seriousness pervades throughout... What's striking is the astonishing scope, potential and possibility Sontag saw in short fiction' Financial TimesThe complete collected short stories of Susan Sontag, one of the most brilliant and influential writers of the twentieth centurySusan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears.Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements.'Sontag is one of the most influential critics of her generation' New York Review of Books

An arresting study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century  “Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library  Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era.  This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust’s artistic struggles—the “search” of the subtitle—and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author’s life while exploring how Proust’s personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother’s Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, “Proust’s Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey’s end, at home in time and in eternity too.”

Into the Open is a philosophical and literary inquiry into the deeper meanings of genius. What precisely do we mean when we describe someone this way? What legacy do we invoke when we apply this term?To address this question, Benjamin Taylor here explores how three great minds—Walter Pater, Paul Valry, and Sigmund Freud—viewed a figure widely considered the first great modern genius, Leonardo da Vinci. For each of these great thinkers, Da Vinci is of central importance because for each the received idea of genius has ceased to be a romantic certitude or sacred truth and has become a problem.Invoking Nietzsche's drastic critique of genius, Taylor assesses the less programmatic and more anxious cases of Pater, Valry, and Freud. Whereas Nietzsche sought for and found an escape from romantic humanism, Pater, Valry, and Freud cannot relinquish the idea of genius and serve as troubled witnesses to the dilemma posed by the notion of genius. A myth of genius has been our way of making good the losses romantic modernity entails, Taylor writes, A myth of genius has existed to affirm that, among human lives, some have sacramental shape; that, among human lives, some put into abeyance the equation between life and loss. Such is the post-theological, post-metaphysical role into which we have compelled our geniuses. They make for us one last claim on the sublime.A shift away from the special pleading that has lately plagued literary studies, Taylor's unfazed humanism reasserts the timeless standards of substantiveness, clarity, and grace.

Children in care (CiC), or looked after children, in England achieve less well than their non-looked after peers and as such they receive pupil premium plus funding. This book explores how the pupil premium plus is used to support the educational outcomes of CiC, with specific focus on professionals’ planning processes, the supports and interventions funded using pupil premium plus, and how the impact of the funding is tracked and monitored. It draws on empirical data from semi-structured interviews with designated CiC teachers, social workers, and school heads, and document analysis of 20 school pupil premium strategies. Ben Taylor uses educational theory to analyse the data, drawing on humanist theories, social pedagogy and critical pedagogy to identify key themes in the data including race and class. He argues that pupil premium plus is valued by professionals, who care deeply about CiC. He shows how it is seen as an important and supportive tool which goes beyond the academic to include social and emotional interventions and curriculum enrichment.

Children in care (CiC), or looked after children, in England achieve less well than their non-looked after peers and as such they receive pupil premium plus funding. This book explores how the pupil premium plus is used to support the educational outcomes of CiC, with specific focus on professionals’ planning processes, the supports and interventions funded using pupil premium plus, and how the impact of the funding is tracked and monitored. It draws on empirical data from semi-structured interviews with designated CiC teachers, social workers, and school heads, and document analysis of 20 school pupil premium strategies. Ben Taylor uses educational theory to analyse the data, drawing on humanist theories, social pedagogy and critical pedagogy to identify key themes in the data including race and class. He argues that pupil premium plus is valued by professionals, who care deeply about CiC. He shows how it is seen as an important and supportive tool which goes beyond the academic to include social and emotional interventions and curriculum enrichment.

Gia Campari, David Glassman, Michael Jeans, Patrick McHugh, David Peregrine-Jones, David Shannon and Benjamin Taylor bring combined experience from across a wide range of business sectors to solve your professional problems! 'The 99 Essential Business Questions' will provide you with the answers you're looking for - but it only contains questions and scenarios, ideas and strategies. This is not a straightforward question and answer book. The right questions, and your answers, provide you with the insight to take the right decisions and act in a way that goes beyond the blatantly obvious.The book came about as a result of conversations at the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants, a livery company of the City of London. The seven authors are seasoned management consultants with collective experience of more than 200 years of professional practice. The book grew from their desire to capture their experiences of insightful questioning and package it in a way that is accessible and informative, helpful and practical for practising managers today.