Books by David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones weaves a vivid life story through vignettes of the many famous authors-friends, acquaintances, interview subjects-who gave him personally inscribed books. In Signatures he offers a window onto the lives and work of these extraordinary people.As a child, Pryce-Jones spent time at Isaiah Berlin's house. As a teenager, lunching with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, he prompted an outburst about Parisian anti-Semitism. W. H. Auden found him at Oxford to praise his competition poem, and he later visited Auden in his loft studio in Austria. Svetlana Alliluyeva reminisced about her father, Joseph Stalin, while staying at the Pryce-Jones house in Wales.A highbrow salon gathered in the home of Arthur Koestler, who strove to be an English gentleman and who was with Pryce-Jones in Reykjavik covering the Fischer-Spassky chess match. Saul Bellow spoke of an old friend, now a capo famiglia, promising to deal with student rioters in 1968 Chicago. After swapping houses with Pryce-Jones one summer, Jessica Mitford insisted that he would have been a Communist in the 1930s. Robert Graves challenged a quotation from Virgil, and told the Queen that she was a descendant of Muhammad.We meet V. S. Naipaul, a free spirit who understood that "the world is what it is." Muriel Spark would come round for lunch with the Pryce-Joneses in Florence, enjoying conspiratorial stories about Italian politics. At his sepulchral home in Heidelberg, Albert Speer demonstrated his way of "admitting a little to deny a great deal." In Isaac Singer we see generosity, candor, and mischievous humor.This is only a small sampling of the remarkable personalities who have left their signatures on a fascinating life.

"Treason of the Heart" is an account of British people who took up foreign causes. Not mercenaries, then, but ideologues. Almost all were what today we would call radicals or activists, who thought they knew better than whichever bunch of backward or oppressed people it was that they had come to save. Usually they were applying to others what they saw as the benefits of their culture, and so obviously meritorious was their culture that they were prepared to be violent in imposing it. Some genuinely hated their own country, however, and saw themselves promoting abroad the values their own retrograde government was blocking. The book deals with those like Thomas Paine who saw American independence as the surest means to hurt England; the many who hoped to spread the French revolution and then have Napoleon conquer England; historic characters like Lord Byron and Lawrence of Arabia who fought for the causes that brought them glory; finally those who took up Communism or Nazism. "Treason of the Heart" is nothing less than the tale of intellectuals deluded about the effect of what they are doing - and therefore with immediate reference to today's world.

This important book explains how Arabs are closed in a circle defined by tribal, religious, and cultural traditions. David Pryce-Jones examines the tribal forces which, he believes, ¿drive the Arabs in their dealings with each other and with the West.¿ In the postwar world, he argues, the Arabs reverted to age-old tribal and kinship structures, a closed circle from which they have been unable to escape, and in which violence is systemic. ¿A healthy corrective, a thought-provoking study.¿¿David K. Shipler, New York Times Book Review.