Philip Graham – författare

A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness. In The Moon, Come to Earth, Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney’s, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year’s sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he’s unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter’s challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school—but he also waxes loving about Portugal’s saudade-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can’t help but ache alongside them. A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one’s secret selves, The Moon, Come to Earth is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.

This biography provides a critical account of the life and work of Susan Isaacs (1885-1948). This educationist, a pioneer of child-centred education in Britain was also an early and historically important child psychoanalyst. She is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as the greatest influence on British education in the twentieth century. Yet she is virtually unknown in both educational and psychoanalytic circles. When Melanie Klein was threatened with expulsion from the British Psychoanalytic Society she was by far her most powerful advocate and thus played a major role in determining the direction of British psychoanalysis from the 1940s onwards. This book provides an account of her life and contains much intimate material about her childhood, her marriage and her work that was previously unknown. It gives a fascinating insight into many facets of her life and concludes with an appraisal of her impact on the worlds of education and psychoanalysis.

This biography provides a critical account of the life and work of Susan Isaacs (1885-1948). This educationist, a pioneer of child-centred education in Britain was also an early and historically important child psychoanalyst. She is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as the greatest influence on British education in the twentieth century. Yet she is virtually unknown in both educational and psychoanalytic circles. When Melanie Klein was threatened with expulsion from the British Psychoanalytic Society she was by far her most powerful advocate and thus played a major role in determining the direction of British psychoanalysis from the 1940s onwards. This book provides an account of her life and contains much intimate material about her childhood, her marriage and her work that was previously unknown. It gives a fascinating insight into many facets of her life and concludes with an appraisal of her impact on the worlds of education and psychoanalysis.