The Fatal Englishman The Fatal Englishman

The Fatal Englishman

Three Short Lives

    • 4.0 • 5 Ratings
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young.
Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist.
Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his
experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three.
Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of
his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time.
Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique
portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
RELEASED
2002
March 12
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
336
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
3.9
MB

Customer Reviews

Smithunderway ,

Short lives par excellence

Together with Birdsong, this exquisite volume of short lives stands apart in Faulks' ouevre. Both are unforgettable, the latter for its vividness and the authority of the narrative -- you don't need any footnotes to fall under this biographer's spell.

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More Books by Sebastian Faulks

Birdsong Birdsong
1997
Jeeves and the Wedding Bells Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
2013
Human Traces Human Traces
2006
The Girl at the Lion d'Or The Girl at the Lion d'Or
1999
A Week in December A Week in December
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2018