Life changes in an instant. On a foggy beach in San Francisco, Abby Mason
- photographer, fiancée, soon-to-be-stepmother
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Life changes in an instant. On a foggy beach in San Francisco, Abby Mason
- photographer, fiancée, soon-to-be-stepmother
-

...

Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult
- & potentially controversial. Was it enough
...

It had never been the best of marriages & over recent years it had become effectively a marriage in name & outward appearance only. Yet, in the autumn of 1960, Winifred & Daniel Coulson presented an acceptable facade to the outside world, for Daniel had prospered sufficiently to allow them to live at Wearcill House, a mansion situated in the most favoured outskirt of the Tyneside town of Fellburn.

Of their children, it was Donald on whom Winifred doted to the point of obsession, & now he was to be married, Winifred's prime concern was whether Donald was entering wedlock with an unbesmirched purity of body & spirit, for amidst the strange workings of her mind much earlier conceptions of morality & the teachings of the Church held sway.

There was something potentially explosive just below the surface of life at Wearcill House, but when that explosion came it was in a totally unforeseeable & devastating form, plunging the Coulsons into an excoriating series of crises out of which would come both good & evil, as well as the true significance of The Year of the Virgins...



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As the Pargiters, a middle-class London family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 'present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism & Empire, & the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness & crippled with despair, the novel is a powerful indictment of ' Victorianism' & its values. The Years, written in 1937, was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. ...

At the heart of Master of the Senate is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works, how the US Senate works, how Lyndon Johnson on his way to the presidency, mastered both, & how he used his power to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since 1868. Interweaving his narrative of Johnson's political career during the 1950s with brilliantly concise & acute history of the Senate, Caro shows us: How Johnson, employing his guile, his unerring instinct about his colleagues, & his strategic brilliance, became Majority Leader after only one term, & soon the most powerful man in the Senate. How the youngest & greatest Senate leader America has had changed the 'unchangeable' Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a tightly run legislative machine. How he destroyed the one man who threatened the monetary invincibility of the Texas oil barons who had financed Johnson's rise to power. How Johnson changed the course of Civil Rights in America. This is how political initiatives triumph or fail, how political genius functions. A magnificent work rich in the authority, insight & narrative power that made the Washington Post say of Caro on Johnson: ' At the summit of American historical writing-Proof that we live in the great age of biography.' ...