Isobel Murray – författare

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Wilde's poetry and prose short stories, plays, critical dialogues and his only novel - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Oscar Wilde's dramatic private life has sometimes threatened to overshadow his great literary achievements. His talent was prodigious: the author of brilliant social comedies, fairy stories, critical dialogues, poems, and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In addition to Dorian Gray, this volume represents all these genres, including such works as Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, 'The Happy Prince', 'The Critic as Artist', and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

`Yet each man kills the thing he loves,By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!' A powerful poem of universal guilt and a protest against capital punishment, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is Wilde's best-known poem, yet it is quite unlike the rest of his poetry. At Oxford Wilde discarded the passion and politics of his mother's Irish nationalistic anti-famine poetry and opted to follow an English Romantic tradition, paying tribute to Keats, Swinburne, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Admiration of French masters gradually led to his writing Impressionist, even decadent poems and his collection Poems (1881) brought accusations of obscenity and plagiarism as well as scathing reviews. Unabashed, Wilde revised and reprinted his final `Author's Edition' in 1892, by which time he was the successful author of fiction, criticism, and Lady Windermere's Fan. This volume follows as closely as possible the chronological order of composition, highlighting autobiographical elements including the young Wilde's conflicting attitudes to Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, and his fluctuating attraction to Roman Catholicism. The Appendix shows Wilde's original ordering, constructed with great care around a `musical' arrangement of themes. The poems reveal unexpected aspects of a literary chameleon usually identified with sparkling wit and social comedy. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Jim Baxter - the legendary 'Slim Jim' - was arguably Scotland's greatest-ever footballer, a left-footed genius who became a Rangers icon and helped Scotland humiliate world champions England at Wembley in 1967 - with some famous keepie-uppie along the way. And although much has been written about Slim Jim over the years, the real story behind his life is now revealed for the first time. When Jim Baxter joined Rangers in 1960 for a record fee of £17,500, he quickly proved his worth, helping the team to ten trophies over the next five years. It was the start of a glittering career and a hard-drinking, hard-living lifestyle in the big city, where he fully enjoyed the fruits of his success. But behind the glamour on and off the park, Jim Baxter hid a secret that would torment him for most of his life, a secret he only discovered the full truth about when he was fifty years old. What is beyond doubt is that Slim Jim Baxter will forever be revered for his unbelievable footballing talent. He will also be remembered for his ability to live life to the full and beyond. But had he uncovered the truth earlier about the family secret that left him shattered, the life of this footballing genius might have been very different both on and off the pitch.

Jessie Kesson is forever associated with her first novel, the fictionalised autobiography of her early years, The White Bird Passes. Born illegitimate in a Workhouse and raised in an Elgin slum, she was removed from her beloved but neglectful mother and sent to an orphanage in Kirkton of Skene. There she throve and shone, but was refused any chance of higher education, and ended up a year in a mental hospital. After marriage, she became a cottar wife around North East Scotland, before moving to London, where she combined writing novels and radio plays with jobs from cleaning a cinema to producing Woman's Hour. The first edition of her authorised biography won the National Library of Scotland/Saltire Research Book of the Year in 2000. It revealed an extraordinary woman making her life and art out of all life threw at her, overcoming and transforming it all. This second edition at last reveals the truth about her ever-absent father, here named.

This is the first volume in a series begun by Isobel Murray and Bob Tait in 1984, and finished in 2008 Authors covered in other volumes include: 2. Iain Banks, Bernard MacLaverty, Naomi Mitchison, Iain Crichton Smith,Alan Spence. 3. Janice Galloway, John Herdman, Robin Jenkins, Joan Lingard, Ali Smith. 4. Jackie Kay, Ian Rankin, Alan Massie, James Robertson, William (Bill) Watson. Extracts from Reviews for Volume 3 Murray is a fine interviewer as well as an incisive critic, academic and biographer. These aren't the kind of interviews that merely gift-wrap the books under discussion; here she's putting whole careers up for lively discussion, and unless she has read every word she wouldn't dream of pressing the tape recorder's "on" button. This is one book it would be impossible to read without wanting to re-read at least half a dozen more straight away. David Robinson, The Scotsman One woman has for several years been circumventing the tired old restrictions and distortions of the formula. Isobel Murray, Honorary Professor in Modern Scottish Literature at Aberdeen University, has been getting writers to talk, at length, on tape ...It is an utterly gripping collection.Because the writers are allowed to express themselves without being manipulated or paraphrased, their conversation evolves into real revelation. Murray's consummate skill as an interviewer. She never intrudes, or interrupts, or postures. Her deep knowledge and understanding of literature and writing act as a sort of psychological water diviner, drawing out descriptions and confidences that a less clever interrogator would never bring to the surface. The obvious luminaries of this series may be the writers, but the pole star is Murray. Most other interviewers are mere astral dust by comparison. Rosemary Goring, The Herald Simply indispensable. Hugh MacDonald, The Herald

Jessie Kesson is best known for her loosely autobiographical novel The White Bird Passes, first published in 1958. It tells the story of a sensitive child in an Elgin slum, and her later banishment to an Aberdeenshire orphanage. She also published Glitter of Mica, Where the Apple Ripens and Another Time, Another Place, which was made into an award-winning film by Michael Radford. She was a writer of radio plays for the BBC for many years, and Stewart Conn has described her as 'one of the finest of for-radio writers'. She died in 1994, aged 78. Since then, Isobel Murray has edited a selection of her poems, plays and stories, Somewhere Beyond, and written a biography, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life. It was published in 2000, and was awarded a prize from the National Library of Scotland, as Research Book of the Year. Kesson and her husband were farm workers in North East Scotland from 1939 to 1951, and this volume contains work from this period, illustrating her abiding love of nature and immersion in the changing seasons. 'I carry climates within me', she said, and 'woods are my territory'.Her writing career was established in 1946 when she was commissioned to contribute twelve monthly articles on 'A Country Dweller's Year' for The Scots Magazine: 'I'm a real writer now'.