Adam Sisman Boeken

John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood - the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by 'sixteen hugless years' in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man - through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. Millions of readers are hungry to know the truth about him. Written with exclusive access to le Carre himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, this is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.

The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive. Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. "Now that he is dead," Sisman writes, "we can know him better."

'I embarrassed myself by uncontrollable guffaws ... This is a truly wonderful story' A. N. Wilson, Spectator 'A white-knuckle roller-coaster ride of fibs and frauds' Sunday Telegraph 'An utterly mad, and wholly delightful story of chicanery and fantasy' Simon WinchesterOne day in November 1958, the celebrated historian Hugh Trevor-Roper received a curious letter. It was an appeal for help, written on behalf of a student at Magdalen College, with the unlikely claim that he was being persecuted by the Bishop of Oxford. Curiosity piqued, Trevor-Roper agreed to a meeting. It was to be his first encounter with Robert Parkin Peters: plagiarist, bigamist, fraudulent priest and imposter extraordinaire. The Professor and the Parson traces the strange career of one of Britain's most eccentric criminals. Motivated not by money but by a desire for prestige, Peters' lied, stole and cheated his way to academic positions and religious posts from Cambridge to New York, Singapore and South Africa. Frequently deported, and even more frequently discovered, his trail of destruction included seven marriages (three of which were bigamous), an investigation by the FBI and a disastrous appearance on Mastermind. Based on Trevor-Roper's own detailed 'file on Peters', The Professor and the Parson is a witty and charming account of eccentricity, extraordinary narcissism and a life as wild and unlikely as any in fiction.

"The friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced dazzling results; from it came Lyrical Ballads, the volume that kick-started the Romantic movement in England. Though much has been written about both these two, this is the first modern biography to consider them together. The result restores balance to a story distorted by bitterness and recrimination." "Rarely if ever have two such gifted writers cooperated so closely Coleridge, who acknowledged Wordsworth as the greatest poet since Milton, was himself a poet of unique talents, and moreover was widely recognized to be the outstanding genius of his time. In the summer of 1797, they began to meet almost daily, usually in the company of Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, whose ardent manner delighted Coleridge and whose sensitivity to the natural world fed much of the poets' work. These three spent a lot of their time outside, glorying in the beauty of their surroundings and recognizing in nature a haven from the dehumanizing forces of the age. In the euphoria of mutual discovery, these two brilliant and idealistic young men planned a poem that would succeed where the French Revolution had failed; a poem that would, quite literally, change the world." "Perhaps such a perfect friendship could not last. As Sisman reveals, rivalry bred tension between them, erupting into a painful quarrel and leading to a complete break, with only a partial reconciliation afterward. The great poem they had dreamed of was never written."--BOOK JACKET.

Fascinující a zábavná sbírka nejbizarnějších příhod z celého světa – Tvář z Marsu, Nebeský hon na 20 000 let starého pštrosa, Falešné těhotenství u mužů, Pře lékaře-kanibalů, Spolkla hada ve spánku, Zmrazený za živa,Z matky s nebožtíky, Ztracené osoby, Zázraky, Krvácející sochy, Hluční duchové, Duchové a zjevení, Záhadná světla, Upíři, Tajuplná věda, Záhady moře a mnoho dalších příběhů.