Richard Bradford

A variously tragic tale of escapism and assimilation, Richard Bradford''s The Durrells explores the truth behind the image. The Durrells are probably the most celebrated literary family of the 20th century. Gerald turned them into celebrities with his tripartite memoir, beginning with My Family and Other Animals (1956) which told of his experiences with his widowed mother Louisa and three siblings during their time in 1930s Corfu. We know of the Durrells from their own writings and from the image of them created by TV, film and biographical accounts of specific figures. What we do not know is the truth. Using previously unpublished material from the Jersey Archive, Richard Bradford unravels the lives of the famous four children of the Corfu era – Larry, Gerry, Margo and Lesli – as they find themselves geographically and emotionally divided amongst a backdrop of imperial decline and unrest. The children of moneyed colonialists, they were already used to being treated with aghast fascination by the island’s locals, and by expatriate Britons as a disgrace to the homeland. Yet their story goes beyond the Ionian Sea, and The Durrells delves into the complex social and political circumstances in which the family lived, with seemingly constant threats of war and endangerment to both themselves and their natural environment.

One of the most enduringly popular and controversial writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell's work is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime. Possibly, in the age of Brexit and populism, even more so. He foresaw 'Fake News' in Nineteen Eighty Four's 'Doublethink', the creation of the EU and predicted that post-Imperial xenophobia would cause Britain to leave it. Separate from his career as a political theorist and novelist, Orwell's life is fascinating in its own right. Disillusioned with his family's upper middle-class complacency, Orwell grew to despise the class system that spawned him, despite being unable to fully detach from it. In truth, he reserved as much suspicion and distaste for the 'proles' as he did pity. Orwell: A Man of Our Time offers a vivid portrait of the man behind the writings, placing both him and his work at the centre of the current political landscape.

Ernest Hemingway was an involuntary chameleon, who would shift seamlessly from a self-cultivated image of hero, aesthetic radical, and existential non-conformist to a figure made up at various points of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion, narcissism and arbitrary vindictiveness. Richard Bradford shows that Hemingway's work is by parts erratic and unique because it was tied into these unpredictable, bizarre features of his personality. Impressionism and subjectivity always play some part in the making of literary works. Some authors try to subdue them while others treat them as the essentials of creativity but they endure as a ubiquitous element of all literature. They are the writer's private signature, their authorial fingerprint. In this ground-breaking and intensely revealing new biography, including previously unpublished letters from the Hemingway archives, Richard Bradford reveals how Hemingway all but erased his own existence through a lifetime of invention and delusion, and provides the reader with a completely new understanding of the Hemingway oeuvre.

As one of the most enduringly popular and controversial novelists of the last century, the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's death in 2020 will certainly be marked by conferences, festivals and media events - but more significant than these acts of commemoration is his relevance today. Despite the commonplace view that Animal Farm was aimed exclusively at Stalinist Russia, it was far more broadly focussed and the similarities between aspects of the novel and Trump's America are obvious. `Not only the parallels with the current President, but also by those who feel that his cult of personality is a mandate for collective nastiness. 'Doublethink' features in Nineteen Eighty Four and it is the forerunner to 'Fake News'. Aside from Orwell's importance as a political theorist and novelist his life in its own right is a beguiling narrative. His family was caught between upper middle-class complacency and uncertainty, and Orwell's time at Prep School and as a scholarship boy at Eton caused him to despise the class system that spawned him despite finding himself unable to fully detach himself from it. His life thereafter mirrored the history of his country; like many from his background he devoted himself to socialism as a salve to his conscience. He died at the point when Britain's status as an Imperial and world power had waned. An interest in him endures, principally because it is difficult to differentiate between the man who recorded the terrible events of the depression and the Spanish Civil War as an observer and the fiction writer who used literature to predict grim possibilities and diagnose horribly endemic inclinations. No other British writer of the 20th century has blended ideas, political commentary and literary art in such a manner. For an author whose work has been regarded as the most important in terms of the turbulent years of the mid-20th century and who eroded the boundaries between literature, journalism and political commentary, there have been relatively few attempts to present a vibrant portrait of the man behind the writings. Fifteen years (closer to eighteen when this book appears) is a long time for the absence of a life of one of one of the best-known authors of the twentieth century.