John Carey Livres

What was it like to be caught in the firestorm that destroyed Pompeii? To have dinner with Attila the Hun? To watch the charge of the Light Brigade? To see the Titanic slide beneath the waves? John Carey's best-selling "Faber Book of Reportage" draws its eyewitness account from memoirs, travel books and newspapers. This is history with the varnish removed. "A quite stunning collection. There are descriptions in this book so fresh that they sear themselves into the imagination". (Jeremy Paxman)

So too are today's experts - Steve Jones on the Human Genome Project, Richard Dawkins on DNA and many other representatives of the contemporary genre of popular science-writing which, John Carey argues, challenges modern poetry and fiction in its imaginative power.

In 1954 William Golding was 43 years old and a nobody. He had been demobbed from the navy at the end of World War Two and returned to his pre-war job teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Always hard up, he lived in what he called a “lousy council flat” with his wife, Ann, and their two young children. In 1952 he finished the novel that was to become Lord of the Flies, and sent it to five publishers and a literary agency. They all rejected it. The sixth publisher he tried was Faber and Faber, and the professional reader wrote her opinion on the typescript: “Time the Future. Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull.” But the novel was rescued from the reject pile by a new recruit to Faber, and when it was finally published in September 1954 the poet Stevie Smith greeted it as “this beautiful and desperate book”. In the early 1960s cultural commentators noted that Lord of the Flies was replacing Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as the bible of the American adolescent. Its anti-war tenor helped to ensure its profound impact on the young at a time when the Cold War was hotting up. Since then, his masterpiece has established itself as a modern classic. In this short, compelling guide, John Carey tells us how and why.

The first biography of Nobel Prize winning novelist William Golding by celebrated writer and critic, John Carey. Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding's intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man.

A new approach to Thackeray. Although this study embraces all his work, it switches attention from his late novels, and bases the case for his imaginative vitality on the multifarious material - reviews, travel books, burlesques, "Punch" articles - that he turned out, mostly under severe financial stress, at the start of his writing career. Here was the breeding ground of "Vanity Fair"; here we find the subversive Thackeray, foe of humbug and high art, waylaying snobbery and the cant of social reformers with bravura and buffoonery - the Thackeray who, in Trollope's words, 'laughed, and ate, and drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion.' In portraying the range and intensity of Thackeray's imagination, topics singled out include: light and painting; ballet dancers; pantomime; "haute cuisine"; time's ruins; and the rainbow realm of commerce. The picture of Thackeray, as man and artist, that emerges, is fresh and challenging.

An exploration of the strange poetry of Dickens's imagination by leading academic and critic John Carey. Setting aside the usual interpretations of Dickens's work, A Violent Effigy delves into the wonderful, terrible fantasy world it inhabited.

Get started with C++ programming by learning how to build applications using its data structures and algorithms Key Features Explore data structures such as arrays, stacks, and graphs with real-world examples Study the trade-offs between algorithms and data structures and discover what works and what doesn't Discover how techniques such as bloom filters and multi-way heaps boost real-world applications Book Description C++ is a mature multi-paradigm programming language that enables you to write high-level code with a high degree of control over the hardware. Today, significant parts of software infrastructure, including databases, browsers, multimedia frameworks, and GUI toolkits, are written in C++. This book starts by introducing C++ data structures and how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. In later chapters, the book explains the basic algorithm design paradigms, such as the greedy approach and the divide-and-conquer approach, which are used to solve a large variety of computational problems. Finally, you will learn the advanced technique of dynamic programming to develop optimized implementations of several algorithms discussed in the book. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to implement standard data structures and algorithms in efficient and scalable C++ 14 code. What you will learn Build applications using hash tables, dictionaries, and sets Explore how modern hardware affects the actual run-time performance of programs Apply common algorithms such as heapsort and merge sort for string data types Use C++ template metaprogramming to write code libraries Implement a URL shortening service using a bloom filter Use appropriate modern C++ idioms such as std:: array instead of C-style arrays Who this book is for This book is for developers or students who want to revisit basic data structures and algorithm design techniques. Although no mathematical background is required, basic knowledge of complexity classes and Big O notation along with a qualification in an algorithms course will help you get the most out of this book. Familiarity with C++ 14 standard is assumed

Beginning with an account of his life, it takes as its domain not only the whole range of the poetry, but also the sermons, the letters, the spiritual and controversial works, and such highly personal documents as the treatise on suicide. 'The one book we have needed all along...

A collection of John Carey's greatest, wisest, and wittiest reviews-amassed over a lifetime of writing