Bøger udgivet af Michael Walmer

With his career at its zenith, known universally for his three volumes of magnificently witty stories, Saki in 1912 was ready to branch out. He decided to apply his genius to a single long narrative in a novel.The Unbearable Bassington sports his famous raillery at its highest pitch:"…she came of a family whose individual members went through life, from the nursery to the grave, with as much tact and consideration as a cactus-hedge might show in going through a crowded bathing tent.""…I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.""…if one hides one's talent under a bushel one must be careful to point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is hidden."This story introduces us to another of the author's louche young men, basking in the glow of society whilst also managing to undermine it stealthily. The handsome and infuriatingly nonchalant Comus Bassington and his mother Francesca are struggling along at the edges somewhat - an advantageous marriage would certainly help. And Comus has met an heiress who appeals, Elaine de Frey. But he has a rival, his friend Courtenay Youghal, who is an up and coming young politician of great surface charm.Francesca is relying on Comus, and there's no accounting for what she might do if he doesn't come up trumps. It will not only be embarrassing to his and his mother's pride, it will also place a terrible strain on their resources.The tracing of not only the simmering and uproarious repartee, but also the implicit tragedy in the venal expectations of high society in The Unbearable Bassington introduced a new note in Saki's repertoire. Their combined power made for a book which was instantly celebrated as one of the great novels of its decade.

Cuffy Mahony is a young boy in country Victoria in the late nineteenth century. He lost his father just under a year ago, and his mother is feeling the heat a little, both in looking after him and his little sister Luce, and in maintaining her job as the village postmistress. But they manage as best they can, with the help of their live-in maid Bowey.Mary Mahony struggles proudly to keep up the standards set when her husband Richard was alive. He had been in his last years a difficult man, and in some senses she is aware of a feeling of newfound freedom. But she does worry about her children and what will become of them on her small wage.She finally decides that the time has come for her to take leave and find a good school with a scholarship for Cuffy in Melbourne. Her house-proudness means that the place must be spruced up, so that her temporary replacement won't get a poor impression. With intense industry she sets about a major tidy and painting job. One day, up a ladder, she reaches over a little too far, and comes crashing down heavily onto the floor. This minor disaster starts a chain of events that will alter irredeemably all their lives.With extraordinarily lucid and forceful prose, Henry Handel Richardson charts the inner worlds of mother and son as they attempt to overcome their fears and face life without becoming too cowed by doubt. The End of a Childhood is both a pendant piece to Richardson's great trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, and readable separately as a delicate, heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of a crucial nexus in the life of a family.

In 1909, ten years had elapsed since Max Beerbohm's last volume of essays. In the time which had passed, his style had evolved to become a little more elegiac, a little less over-consciously clever. Yet Again gave full voice to his new mode, moulded by constant journalism into a superb clear flow. Still present are trenchantly funny criticism of banality, gorgeous erudition, countered expectations and, most of all, delicious irony. In ¿Seeing People Off we are asked to examine the terrible truth behind awkward goodbyes; in A Club in Ruins the strange and lugubrious magnetism of dying buildings is surveyed; in Ichabod¿ the author shamefacedly asks himself why he should mind that all the labels have been cleaned from his luggage; in The House of Commons Manner he bemoans the surprising lack of skill in speaking of the august members of that house; and in Dulcedo Judiciorum a full account is rendered of the superiority of the entertainment provided by the law courts over that of the theatre. Alongside seventeen other brilliant essays, there is here also a special section of nine imaginative depictions inspired by famous artworks.

Edith and Bruce Ottley could not be called idyllically married. But a form of love persists between them, and their two precocious young children, Archie and Dilly, provide a further bond.Bruce's latest enthusiasms in their social circle are the Mitchells, whose parties are slightly risque and enormous fun, attracting all comers except the most staid. There the Ottleys meet Aylmer Ross, a handsome widowed barrister. Edith and he are drawn together irresistibly. But whilst Aylmer would like to take things further, Edith is loyal to Bruce. Their friendship, almost immediately quite intense, suffers onrushes and reverses as they grow to understand one another's limits.Then one day in Kensington Gardens Edith's world of loyalty is torn apart. She sees a couple clearly in love, hand in hand, sitting in a secluded seat. On closer examination she can't believe her eyes - one of them is Bruce! And the other is Miss Townsend, Archie and Dilly's governess! Will this deceit be enough to sway Edith and send her into Aylmer's willing embrace? What must she do ensure that everything turns out as it should?In Tenterhooks, her fourth novel, Ada Leverson rehearsed quite closely details of her own life. The decision of her husband Ernest to leave her and emigrate to Canada had been a major wrench. Exactly how nearly the plot follows reality is not known for certain but, with dash and sureness, the author delineates a sensitive and principled woman's responses to adversity, super-imposing upon them the wit and gaiety for which she was so renowned, creating a moving and entertaining portrait of a crisis in a marriage. The second of the three Ottleys novels,Tenterhooks was first published in 1912.

The neat ship Grosvenor is fully laden and crewed, and slowly traversing the English Channel, ready to leave on a trading journey to the other side of the Atlantic. Edward Royle has joined as second mate, new to the ship. As they make headway there are rumblings among the crew. Their provisions are rotten: damp, weevilled biscuit and stinking meat.The Grosvenor's firebrand captain and his tough American first mate won't stand for any interruption to the journey. They falsely indicate to the men that they will stop somewhere en route to take on new provisions. Royle is incensed on the men's behalf. The four survivors of a mid-Atlantic wreck are added to the ship's company at great risk, against the wishes of the mercenary captain, who would have left them to die. One of them, the capable Mary Robertson, quickly gains Royle's admiration.Things rapidly reach boiling point back on the Grosvenor. The mutiny is swift; Royle is forcibly enjoined to run the ship. Most of the crew are desperate to avoid the inevitable punishment - Royle gets wind of their plan to leave him, Mary and her father, the loyal boatswain and the cowardly steward to die in the deliberately holed ship once Royle has guided them near to land at Bermuda. His growing feelings for Mary further invigorate his determination to survive. The scene is set for a great trial against seemingly insurmountable odds.......W. Clark Russell's The Wreck of the 'Grosvenor' was the most successful novel of mutiny of the Victorian era. His sensitive depiction of the moods of both the sea and the skies, and the technical skill which only a seasoned seafarer could bring to the tale, make for a stirring and realistic spectacle. This moving novel became Russell's signature work.

Roderick Random's story is a classic rambunctious tale of rags and riches, set in the mid-eighteenth century.Roderick's father goes mad soon after he is born, in grief at his beloved wife's death. Roderick is cast into life as a virtual orphan, tumbles through a wild time at school, and ends up, on leaving, escaping to the heaving metropolis of London. There he encounters, with his best friend Strap, characters of a huge variety; card-sharpers, fallen women, bumbling doctors and malicious quacks, and very dubious gentlemen-about-town. He finally goes to sea after an inordinate waiting period spent hazarding the interminable bureaucracy of trying to get a place as a ship's medic. His fortunes rise and fall it seems on the spin of a coin, diving into indigence after being raised to the heights of elegance, time and again. His luck with women is similarly strange-starred and various, until one day he meets the lovely Narcissa Topehall and his heart is given forever.In splendidly picaresque scenes Smollett's story ranges from tattered London to the high social intensities of Bath society, to France and the soldier's life, out to sea and the West Indies and South America, roiling with grotesque humour and biting satire. With the support of a few good friends and despite the resistance of a goodl;y number of enemies, Roderick's fortunes are tested, luck and fate rolling the dice as to his chances, forging a scapegrace hero fit for his times.

Dormer is an old house with Elizabethan origins, much added to. It sits, very isolated, in a cup of the Shropshire hills, surrounded by forest. The Darke family have lived there for centuries. Solomon Darke is a squire farmer who tends to unthinking conservatism; his wife Rachel is harsh, fierce and uncompromising. They have four children - the eldest is the sensitive and original Amber, who feels, at thirty, that life has passed her by. Her brothers Jasper and Peter are more strong-willed - Jasper questions all around him in a determined but romantic way, while Peter has no time for any fuss and forcefully seeks simple pleasures. Their younger sister Ruby is biddable, nä¿¿ve and full of laughter. Rachel Darke's ancient mother lives with them, a harridan remnant in ringlets and flounces, dominating this already intense family with savage outbursts and calculating glances. Completing the family is Catherine, a young relative of Rachel and her mother, whose icy beauty has entrapped Jasper, and whose cold passions equal in power the heat of the Darkes'. A complex web of personal desires and long held antipathies becomes activated in the first instance by Jasper's return home, having been expelled from college for his rejection of religion. As hoped-for alliances collapse, dubious loves flower, well-laid plans go awry, and thwarted yearnings erupt into flame, this singular family and all around them are drawn into a seeming vortex which threatens to carry all with it to destruction. Mary Webb's personality shared a great deal with that of Emily Brontë, in terms not only of her love of nature and its kindling power, but also of her openness to the fullness of ardency. In this extraordinary third novel she delved this self profoundly, also introducing, in a way she hadn't before, leavening humour and cool analysis of character to balance this modern gothic vehemence. The House in Dormer Forest is heady and fascinating, risking a great deal and triumphing uniquely.

It is the late 1920s, and beautiful young Eve Wentworth is in a sticky situation. Both Harold and Hubert have asked her to marry them, and her inability to decide on either of them speaks volumes.Then Hugh Erskine, her sister Serena's husband, receives a letter from Jeremy Vaughan, a young family friend. He invites all three of them to join him on a tour of the Nile, sailing on a traditional dahabeah, but with all the mod cons of course. It seems the perfect solution to Eve's dilemma, and a delightful escape into the bargain.But things turn out to be not quite so simple. Eve has always liked Jeremy; she's known him since she was a little girl and he a slightly older boy. Soaking up all his knowledge of ancient Egypt, and enormously moved by the exotic beauty of an extraordinary and powerful landscape, slowly she registers that her feelings toward him are changing. To her chagrin, though, she can't help noticing that Jeremy seems very taken with Isobel Page, a wealthy young American they meet along the way.With delicately witty dialogue and amusing situations, Stella Tennyson Jesse takes us on an entertaining tour, not only of these tentatively perched emotions, but also of the magnificent and romantic remains of one of the world's great civilisations. Eve in Egypt is the sparklingly satisfying answer to a fascinating question: can one turn a travelogue into a beguiling novel? Jesse proves that one can, brilliantly.

In two brilliant collections of stories, Reginald (1904) and Reginald in Russia (1910), which spanned the Edwardian period, Saki made his name as the predominant wit of the emergent twentieth century. As the new Georgian age dawned, his star was at its height:"..Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more sylvan than "leafy Kensington." She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch...""...I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English...""...You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."In this volume, first published in 1911, he introduced a new titular character, albeit with a huge resemblance to both Reginald and himself. Clovis Sangrail is unsurprisable, louche in conversation, thoroughly determined to avoid the banal. In this magnificent collection, he observes the ludicrous with an unswerving eye, and undermines it with rapier-like skill, while gleefully and covertly turning all to his advantage. Saki had announced himself as the brief Edwardian flame burnt itself out; with the brilliance of this volume he made it plain that he had no intention of fading away.