Simon Raven's wonderfully funny cricketing memoir covers a golden age from the early 1930s to the 1950s. With his unerring eye for observation, Raven hilariously recounts matches played at Charterhouse, Cambridge and cricket grounds as far afield as Bangalore, Kenya and Corfu. The autobiography is peopled with the author's famous and infamous friends and partners in crime and littered with memorable anecdotes.

‘Presuming even your capacity for borrowing money without qualm or security has by now lost much of its edge, it only remains that you should make some.’ The words of the Bursar ringing in his ears, Esme Sangrail Sa Foy is pushed into working in his summer holidays as a way of settling his college’s bills. Hired by the Honourable Mrs Sandra Fairweather, as holiday tutor to her adopted son Terence, Esme’s brief is unusual. Not expected to teach Terence anything, he is there to keep him out of trouble. Perhaps Terence’s psychiatrist Doctor MacTavish is a sign that nothing in the Fairweather household is what it seems. As the summer develops and Esme and Terence leave London for Suffolk and finally Biarritz, Esme makes his discoveries.**

Fielding Gray, his face and mind scarred by a Cyprus terrorist's bomb, is sent back to the scene of his disaster to prepare a television feature on the liberated islanders. On the way he twice narrowly escapes violent death. Not even the lustfully inventive Angela Tuck can take his mind off the fact that someone is anxious to eliminate him before he digs too deeply into a squalid and explosive political scandal, but he refuses to be dissuaded - until he meets Nicos, golden-bodied young Greek bearing tempting gifts which Fielding has never been able to refuse ...

When Lieutenant Alastair Lynch shoots young Drummer Malcolm Harley in the back for desertion in the face of an enemy attack, his action seems to be clearly justified by military precedent. But after a court martial is convened to examine the facts of the case, a different story emerges. A tale of passionate love, possessiveness, and jealousy between the two men, a brazen and scandalous relationship that ended in Harley's violent death. The tension builds as the truth about the two men's liaison and Lynch's decision to pull the trigger gradually emerges, leading to a shocking finale.Simon Raven's classic first novel The Feathers of Death (1959) is a gripping thriller told in the clever, witty, and compulsively readable style for which Raven is known. This edition features a new introduction by Gregory Woods."Extraordinary . . . entertaining, gripping and in fact memorable." – Sunday Times "An exceptional gift for storytelling . . . told with a...

Friends in Low Places is actually involved with some low types in high places, society, politics and publishing, and they are certainly not friends. Some of them are however affiliated by their concern in a coming election in which one of the contenders, the editor of the magazine Strix, might be exposed by a homosexual episode in the past. Then there's the wedding of low born Tom Llewellyn to the daughter of a conservative minister who is not above reproach-- he had engaged in an under the table attempt to force the Suez crisis; and finally there's an incriminating letter to that effect which changes grasping hands several times before Mark Lewson, who poaches off rich, older women, procures it and is killed....

Fielding Gray is groping his way towards manhood. Golden toy of his public school, potential Cambridge scholar, he seems all set for the easy accolades of upper-class society. In his last summer holiday from school, he has his first urgent, fevered sexual encounters with girls. He loses his innocence by degrees — with the teasing Angela Tuck in games of strip poker ... with fearful Dixie in a fairground Ghost Train ... and, finally, with a coldly efficient prostitute in a little room with a big bed. But 17 year old Fielding is himself a corrupter. His careless debauchment of a younger schoolfellow leads to a sexual tragedy of uncontrollable proportions — and Fielding's future begins to look much less rosy ... Simon Raven in this novel displays to the full his unrivalled talents as a chronicler of corruption in high places. By the bestselling author of The Judas Boy