DJ Taylor – författare

Vårt intresse för spioner, både verkliga och fiktiva, verkar outtömligt. Men var och när började spioneriets historia och hur har spionagearbetet och hantverket utvecklats genom århundradena?

Spioner i historien är en samling porträtt av några av de mest berömda spionerna, men innehåller även några mindre kända och mer överraskande namn: Rahab, den kananeiska kvinnan i Bibeln som hjälper israeliterna före deras anfall mot Jeriko; Thomas Phelippes, en skicklig kryptoanalytiker och hanterare av hemliga agenter under den elisabetanska tiden och Noël Coward, den berömde dramatikern och sångaren som använde sitt kändisskap för att påverka den amerikanska allmänheten och den politiska opinionen för att hjälpa Storbritannien under andra världskriget.

I den här volymen undersöker historiker, forskare och författare underrättelseverksamhet och spionage genom historien från den antika världen till det kalla kriget och vidare till Putins, Trumps och Xi Jinpings tidsålder. Boken finns även i engelsk utgåva.

Vårt intresse för spioner, både verkliga och fiktiva, verkar outtömligt. Men var och när började spioneriets historia och hur har spionagearbetet och hantverket utvecklats genom århundradena?

Spies in History är en samling porträtt av några av de mest berömda spionerna, men innehåller även några mindre kända och mer överraskande namn: Rahab, den kananeiska kvinnan i Bibeln som hjälper israeliterna före deras anfall mot Jeriko; Thomas Phelippes, en skicklig kryptoanalytiker och hanterare av hemliga agenter under den elisabetanska tiden och Noël Coward, den berömde dramatikern och sångaren som använde sitt kändisskap för att påverka den amerikanska allmänheten och den politiska opinionen för att hjälpa Storbritannien under andra världskriget. I den här volymen undersöker historiker, forskare och författare underrättelseverksamhet och spionage genom historien från den antika världen till det kalla kriget och vidare till Putins, Trumps och Xi Jinpings tidsålder. Boken finns även i svensk utgåva.

''Hugely enjoyable'' AN Wilson, Sunday Times''Thoughtful, entertaining and enjoyable'' Michael Gove, Book of the Week, The TimesInspired by William Makepeace Thackeray, the first great analyst of snobbery, and his trail-blazing The Book of Snobs (1848), D. J. Taylor brings us a field guide to the modern snob. Short of calling someone a racist or a paedophile, one of the worst charges you can lay at anybody''s door in the early twenty-first century is to suggest that they happen to be a snob. But what constitutes snobbishness? Who are the snobs and where are they to be found? Are you a snob? Am I? What are the distinguishing marks? Snobbery is, in fact, one of the keys to contemporary British life, as vital to the backstreet family on benefits as the proprietor of the grandest stately home, and an essential element of their view of who of they are and what the world might be thought to owe them.The New Book of Snobs will take a marked interest in language, the vocabulary of snobbery - as exemplified in the ''U'' and ''Non U'' controversy of the 1950s - being a particular field in which the phenomenon consistently makes its presence felt, and alternate social analysis with sketches of groups and individuals on the Thackerayan principle. Prepare to meet the Political Snob, the City Snob, the Technology Snob, the Property Snob, the Rural Snob, the Literary Snob, the Working-class Snob, the Sporting Snob, the Popular Cultural Snob and the Food Snob.

A Times Book of the Year 2019''You should not deny yourself the pleasure of reading it'' Sunday Times''A remarkable work and an important addition to the extraordinary wartime history of literary London'' Literary ReviewWho were the Lost Girls? At least a dozen or so young women at large in Blitz-era London have a claim to this title. But Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, they cut a swathe through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt and was flogged by him on the steps of the Royal Palace. And all of them were associated with the decade''s most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly. Lys, Sonia, Barbara and Janetta had very different - and sometimes explosive personalities - but taken together they form a distinctive part of the war-time demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them determined to make the most of their lives in a highly uncertain environment. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, the severed hand seen on the pavement in the Bloomsbury square, the rustle of a telegram falling through the letter-box, the hasty farewell to another half who might not ever come back, a world of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared. But if their trail runs through vast acreages of war-time cultural life then, in the end, it returns to Connolly and his amorous web-spinning, in which all four of them regularly featured and which sometimes complicated their emotional lives to the point of meltdown.The Lost Girls were the product of a highly artificial environment. After it came to an end - on Horizon''s closure in 1950 - their careers wound on. Later they would have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford. The last of them - Janetta - died as recently as three months ago. However tiny their number, they are a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s. Hectic, passionate and at times unexpectedly poignant, this is their story.

''Taylor''s magnificent new novel is Spinal Tap for literary types . . . thoroughly entertaining, knowledgeable romp through the fear and loathing of rock''s golden age. Beautifully written and consistently funny, it is also a poignant account of one man''s search for his own identity'' Mail on Sunday''A dazzling rollercoaster homage to an era both bacchanalian and oddly innocent'' GuardianYou may remember the Helium Kids. Back in their late ''60s and early ''70s heyday they appeared on Top of the Tops on 27 separate occasions, released five Billboard-certified platinum albums, played sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and were nearly, but not quite, as big as the Beatles and the Stones. Three decades later, in the big house on the outskirts of Norwich, Nick Du Pont is looking back on the rollercoaster years he spent as their publicist in a world of licensed excess and lurking tragedy. What follows is not only the story of a rock band at a formative time in musical history, when America was opening up to English music and huge amounts of money and self-gratification were there for the taking. For the tale is also Nick''s - the life and times of a war-baby born in a Norwich council house, the son of an absconding GI, whose career is a search for some of the advantages that his birth denied him. It is at once a worm''s eye of British pop music''s golden age and a bittersweet personal journey, with cameo appearances from everyone from Elvis and Her Majesty the Queen Mother to Andy Warhol.''Rock and Roll is Life'' is a vastly entertaining, picaresque and touching novel inspired by the excess and trajectories of the great ''60s and ''70s supergroups, and of the tales brought back from the front line by a very special breed of Englishmen who made it big in the States as the alchemists and enablers, as well as the old making way for the new in the era of the baby boomers. At its heart is one man''s adventure, and the poignancy of the special relationships that dominate his life.

Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have together sold over 40 million copies. Even now, he continues to exert a decisive influence on our understanding of international power-politics.D.J. Taylor''s new biography, the first full-length study for 20 years, draws on a wide range of previously unseen material - newly-discovered letters to old girlfriends and professional colleagues, the recollections of the dwindling band of people who remember him, new information about his life in the early 1930s - to produce a definitive portrait of this complex, driven and self-mythologising man.

A new edition of Orwell''s debut novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D. J. TaylorFirst published in 1934, and a bitter souvenir of Orwell''s time as a servant of the British Raj, Burmese Days follows the slow decline of John Flory, as he tries to steer a path between the bores of the Kyauktada club, the machinations of the native magistrate U Po Kyin and his love for a visiting English girl, with tragic results.This new edition includes an introduction, extensive endnotes and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.

A new edition of Orwell''s starkly realistic second novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D. J. TaylorFirst published in 1935, when Orwell was struggling to establish himself as a writer, A Clergyman''s Daughter tells the story of twenty-something Dorothy Hare, whose mundane life in a Suffolk rectory is thrown out of kilter by an amnesiac episode that sets her adrift in a new and frighteningly insecure world.This new edition includes an introduction, extensive anecdotes and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.

A new edition of Orwell''s timeless dystopian classic, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D.J. TaylorSince its first publication in 1949, Orwell''s devastating expose of the totalitarian mind has established itself as the most influential political satire of the modern age. Winston Smith''s doomed rebellion against the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, and a world corrupted by technology and the perversion of language, is as relevant now as it ever was.This new edition includes an introduction and extensive end-notes, and an appendix containing original responses to the novel and several of Orwell''s essays from the period in which Nineteen Eighty-Four was written.

A new edition of Orwell''s savage satire of the Soviet Revolution, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D.J. TaylorFirst published in 1945, just as the allied forces had begun to parcel up the post-war world, Orwell''s satire of the Soviet Revolution was instantly acclaimed as a Cold War classic. Set in the English countryside in the early years of the twentieth century, this is the story of a rebellion that fails, carried out by revolutionaries who all too swiftly turn into the thing they were trying to destroy.This new edition includes an introduction and extensive end-notes, and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which Animal Farm was written.

A new edition of Orwell''s elegiac fourth novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D.J. TaylorFirst published in 1939 and dominated by the shadow of the Second World War, Coming up for Air finds fat, middle-aged and unhappily-married George Bowling trying to revisit the world of his Edwardian childhood in rural Oxforshire, only to discover that the certainties of his past are dead and that a very different future is looming up to claim him.This new edition includes an introduction and extensive end-notes, and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.

A new edition of Orwell''s end-of-tether third novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D.J. TaylorFirst published in 1936, and drawing on Orwell''s own experiences of working in a Hampstead bookshop, Keep the Aspidistra Flying tracks the career of Gordon Comstock (''nearly 30 and moth-eaten already'') a struggling poet who tries to rebel against the conventions of middle-class English life, only to be drawn inexorably back into the world that grinds him down.This new edition includes an introduction and extensive end-notes, and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.

Autumn 1933, and for once struggling writer James Ross seems to have fallen on his feet. Not only has the Labour Exchange fixed him up with a day-job collecting rents in Soho, but friendly Mr Samuelson is employing him front-of-house in the Toreador night-club. Even his melancholy love-life is looking up, thanks to a chance encounter with the alluring Gladys, enigmatic inhabitant of the Meard Street second-floor back.On the other hand, Soho looks an increasingly dangerous place in which to be at large. Not only are Mosley''s Blackshirts on the prowl, but somebody is raiding the dirty bookshops and smashing night-club windows in a quest for moral decency. Fetched up in a police-cell in West End Central after an unfortunate incident outside the Toreador, and coerced into undercover work by the mysterious Inspector Haversham, James finds himself infiltrating the Blackshirts'' Chelsea HQ , leafleting passers-by in the King''s Road and spying on a top-secret dinner party attended by a highly important Royal guest. Meanwhile, the emotional consequences of this deception are set to come as a nasty shock.Praise for At the Chime of a City Clock:''Steeped in historical detail, the novel evokes the sleazy side of the Thirties so vividly that you can almost feel the grease and grime on your fingers.'' Anthony Gardner, Mail on Sunday''Engaging, cheerful, opportunist James Ross. You won''t forget him or the London he frequents for a long time after closing the book.'' Susan Hill, Literary Review''A watchable, atmospheric black-and-white film in novel form'' Sunday Express''Written with a splendid and captivating assurance'' The Scotsman''Finely drawn ... Artful ... Masterly.'' John Sutherland

Since the late 1990s, Private Eye''s ''What You Didn''t Miss'' column has trained a vigilant lens on some of the great literary reputations of our age. Highlights of this bumper selection include Martin Amis exploring the sexual revolution of the 1960s, A.S. Byatt rewriting the Norse myths and the late Anthony Powell reflecting on his death. There are verse contributions from such distinguished contemporary poets as Seamus Heaney, Clive James and Sir Andrew Motion and a host of biographical subjects ranging from Hugh Trevor-Roper to the Bloomsbury Group. Edited and introduced by D.J. Taylor, What You Didn''t Miss Part 94 doubles up as both an hilarious collection of literary lampoons and an alternative history of modern English Literature.

Summer 1931 in seedy Bayswater and James Ross is on his uppers. An aspiring writer whose stories nobody will buy (''It''s the slump''), with a landlady harassing him for unpaid rent and occasional sleepless nights spent in the waiting room at King''s Cross Station, he is reduced to selling carpet-cleaning lotion door-to-door. His prospects brighten when he meets the glamorous Suzi (''the red hair and the tight jumper weren''t a false card: she really was a looker and no mistake''), but their relationship turns out to be a source of increasing bafflement. Who is her boss, the mysterious Mr Rasmussen - whose face bears a startling resemblance to one of the portraits in Police News - and why he so interested in the abandoned premises above the Cornhill jeweller''s shop?Worse, mysterious Mr Haversham from West End Central is starting to take an interest in his affairs. With a brief to keep an eye on Schmiegelow, James finds himself staying incognito at a grand Society weekend at a country house in Sussex, where the truth - about Suzi and her devious employer - comes as an unexpected shock. Set against a backdrop of the 1931 financial crisis and the abandonment of the Gold Standard, acted out in shabby bed-sitters and Lyons tea-shops, At the Chime of a City Clock is an authentic slice of Thirties comedy-noir.Praise for Kept: A Victorian Mystery:''Very entertaining and well done, with a sharp appreciation for the details'' The Times''An ingenious tale of madness, murder and deception.'' The Guardian''A stylish page-turner ... all done with humour and cunning.'' Sunday Telegraph