Selina Guinness – författare

The Crocodile by the Door by Selina Guinness - shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award - is a remarkable, compelling and moving memoir of a farm, a family and a home.When Selina Guinness and her partner Colin, both young academics, moved in with Selina's uncle Charles, an elderly bachelor, they had no idea what the coming years held for them: a crash course in farming, tense discussions with helicopter-borne property developers, human tragedy, and the challenge of dragging a quasi-feudal estate at the edge of Dublin into the twenty-first century. The Crocodile by the Door - a dazzling debut memoir that will appeal to fans of Edmund de Waal, William Fiennes and Richard Benson's The Farm - tells this remarkable story.'Something close to a small masterpiece ... enchanting and hopeful' Miranda Seymour, Daily Telegraph (five stars)'A surprisingly entertaining primer on the travails of farming today,from ungovernable sheep to unfathomable bureaucracy; a fascinating glimpse of what had become of the Anglo-Irish by the late 20th century and into the 21st; an elegant modern pastoral and, at the same time, an astute dismantling of that genre; and a meditation on the meaning of labour, and on how hard work shapes identity as well as achievement.... A remarkable book' Belinda McKeon, Guardian'Guinness is an astute observer and stylish chronicler of landscape, architecture and human character. ... she describes her domestic setbacks and achievements with engaging candour.' Irish Times'A memoir so exceptional that it deserves to be ranked as the Irish Book of the Year' Irish Independent'A very fine writer with a lovely turn of phrase ... Stories need adversity and the overcoming of obstacles and The Crocodile by the Door has plenty' Spectator'Astutely chronicling the wider story of Ireland's downfall through the prism of the farming life, Guinness's book is the unexpected hit of the year' Sunday Business Post'Beautifully wrought ... The book is rich in beautiful imagery ... This is the story of bringing a landscape to life, and it is glorious' Evening Herald

The Resurrection was first performed at the Abbey Theatre on 30 July 1934. Yeats had sketched the play's first scenarios in 1925, and worked on it intermittently for the next nine years. For the author, the work was a kind of study piece for communicating to a general audience his investigations into patterns of historical recurrence. In The Resurrection Yeats asks how the avatar of a new era can be dramatized as a true anomaly, capable of revitalizing a declining civilization through the power of magic or miracle. The play takes the form of a series of questions and answers between three interlocutors (the Greek, the Hebrew, and the Syrian) as they confront the miracle of the risen Christ. As the play ends, Yeats emphasizes the political implications of miracle, which has the sublime and terrifying power to undo the existing but exhausted order and usher in a new epoch. The Cornell Yeats edition presents photographs and transcriptions of the manuscripts, typescripts, and proof pages by which we may trace the author's textual revisions for The Resurrection, leading to its publication in 1932 in Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends and two years later in Wheels and Butterflies and Collected Plays. The drafts of the Introduction to the play are presented, as well. An Appendix presents images of Arthur Duff's score for the songs of The Resurrection. Jared Curtis and Selina Guinness preface the text with a census of manuscripts and an introduction discussing the content of the play and the long history of its composition, including the First Version (1925/6–1927), the Second Version (1929–1934), and the Introduction (1931–1934). The arduous process of revision through which the author humanized his characters and dramatized the dry theological arguments of the early drafts is revealed with remarkable clarity.