Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are top friends of his. Why, then, is he left to languish in the grand hotel owned by Verdugo, which in Spanish means executioner? What is the relationship between Victor, who can write equally well with left hand or right, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, about whom he once made a film, a film which is showing on TV as he enters his suite? Who is the beautiful girl whom he sees in the lobby, and is she the same girl who is later found dead under sinister circumstances? Is Victor England a victim or a killer?There have been many novels about Hollywood. There has never been one like this. Frederic Raphael's vision of California Time is of a 'sequence of presents', and his innovations in the form of the novel serve only to add to the...

First published in 1965, this is a tale of the face that has launched a thousand billboards. Diana Scott is "The Happiness Girl" in ads plastered all over the country, and she's hunting happiness in more ways than she's care to confess. She's the darling of the rich and powerful: of Prince Cesare della Romita...of TV writer and interviewer Robert Gold...of suave business success Miles Brand.She's the life of the Dolce Vita, Paris version - a reckless seeker of self, caught up in a frenzied sexcursion of jet-set Europe. This is her story - a novel based on the bold and powerful Joseph E. Levine motion picture.

Marion and Barnaby Pierce are an American couple who are about to sell the New England house in which they have raised what seems to be a happy family. They are leaving on a trip across America in a vintage jaguar which Barnaby intends to give his son who is getting married in Los Angeles. Their long drive from coast to coast is planned to include a number of stops: the first to deposit their dog with Marion's pious, bitter sister in upstate New York.At every stop there are memories and surprises as Barnaby and Marion live and re-live their secret dramas and, in the allusive, edgy dialogues of a long-married couple, reveal more about themselves than they care to confess. In Minneapolis, they find that their daughter, Stacey, is pregnant by one man and living with another; in Chicago, Barnaby's old writing partner, now a millionaire businessman, is unwisely lured into an old vaudeville routine; in Seattle, a meeting with a newspaper editor who once loved Marion re-opens old...

From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist--an audacious history of Josephus, the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the singular Jew alone in the Gentile world.Joseph ben Mattathias's transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a launching point for an historical appraisal of Diasporan Jews seeking a place in the dominant cultures they inhabit. Raphael brings a scholar's rigor, an historian's intelligence, and a novelist's imagination to this project. He goes beyond the fascinating details of Josephus's life and his singular literary achievements, to examine how he has been viewed by posterity, finding in Josephus the prototype for the unJewish Jew, the assimilated intellectual, and the abiding apostate: the recurrent figures in the long centuries of the Diaspora....

The manager's name was Love. His first- floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. So begins the compelling personal story of one of Britain's finest authors, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a transatlantic voyage, taking us from Chicago to Putney, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Fleet Street – but it is also an intimate journey into the early experiences and inspirations that forged the tools of this most versatile of writers. Tracing a path from the heady Cambridge days that would provide the setting of Raphael's acclaimed BBC television series The Glittering Prizes to the European wanderings and romantic yearnings that helped populate the pages of his opulent novels and Oscar-winning screenplays, this memoir is shot through with its author's incomparable wit and intellect. Ranging...