Ferdinand Mount's Books

Jem (and Sam)

By: Ferdinand Mount

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How does Jeremiah Mount, the dealer in pornography, come to be the lover of the Duchess of Albemarle and the colleague of the great Samuel Pepys? In Pepys' Diary, Jem Mount plays a shadowy role, but in Jem's own memories Sam looms large. Friends and drinking partners at first, they become vicious rivals for fame and women. In his struggle to survive and triumph over his adversary in a rackety world, Jemm stumbles into many trades: chemist, butler, soldier, secretary and, now and then, lover.This 'newly discovered autobiography' - with its disconcerting echoes of our own time - takes its dubious hero from the shaky days of Cromwellian England, through the unbuttoned license of the Restoration, to the panic of Monmouth's Rebellion and the Jamaica sugar boom.

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Page Count

472

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

140904064X

ISBN 13

9781409040644

Making Nice

By: Ferdinand Mount

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Making Nice

By: Ferdinand Mount

The deliciously sharp new novel from Ferdinand Mount, author of the Sunday Times Book of the Year Kiss Myself Goodbye Ferdinand Mount's stinging satire plunges into the dubious world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and the campaign trail in Africa and America. We follow the hapless Dickie Pentecost, redundant diplomatic correspondent for a foundering national newspaper, together with his stern oncologist wife Jane, and their daughters Flo, an aspiring ballerina, and the quizzical teenager Lucy. The whole family find themselves entangled in an ever more alarming series of events revolving around the elusive Ethel (full name Ethelbert), dynamic founder of the soaring public relations agency Making Nice. With echoes of Evelyn Waugh and The Thick of It, Making Nice is a masterly take on the madness of contemporary society and the limitless human capacity for self-deception.

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Page Count

257

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472992865

ISBN 13

9781472992864

English Voices

Lives, Landscapes, Laments

By: Ferdinand Mount

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English Voices

Lives, Landscapes, Laments

By: Ferdinand Mount

‘A sheer delight’ Times Literary Supplement Ferdinand Mount has spent many years writing articles, columns and reviews for prestigious magazines, newspapers and journals. Whether reviewing great published works by some of England's finest authors and poets (both alive and dead) including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John le Carré, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Alan Bennett. He also analysed the works of a variety of our Masters covering the past four hundred years such as, of course, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Pepys. Whether it be holding up to account the writings of Winston Churchill, or celebrating the much-loved poems of Siegfried Sassoon, each essay reproduced in full here has been carefully chosen by Mount to weave a unique tapestry of the wealth of writings that have helped shape his own respected career as an author and political commentator. For anyone interested and passionate about writing and poetry across the centuries in the British Isles, this book will be a very welcome guide to the best one can pick up and read.

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Page Count

645

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1471155994

ISBN 13

9781471155994

Full Circle

How the Classical World Came Back to Us

By: Ferdinand Mount

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Full Circle

How the Classical World Came Back to Us

By: Ferdinand Mount

So much about the society that is now emerging in the twenty-first century bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its entertainment, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. The ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond - almost eerily so - to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recreate theirs. It is as though the 1500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human. This eye-opening book makes us look afresh at who we are and how we got here. Full Circleis not only wonderfully witty and brilliantly astute, but also profound and often disquieting. Ferdinand Mount effortlessly peels back 2000 years of history to show how much we are like the ancients, how in ways both trivial and crucial we arethem and they are us.

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Page Count

503

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1847377998

ISBN 13

9781847377999

Kiss Myself Goodbye

The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

By: Ferdinand Mount

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Kiss Myself Goodbye

The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

By: Ferdinand Mount

Grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page' – Hilary Mantel 'Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original' – Hadley Freeman 'Wonderful, funny and wise' – Kate Summerscale SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021 A SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments. The story leads us from the back streets of Sheffield at the end of the Victorian age to the highest echelons of English society between the wars. An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, now published with new material discovered by the author about his eccentric aunt, Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir and a voyage into a vanished moral world

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Page Count

305

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472979400

ISBN 13

9781472979407

Subversive Family

By: Ferdinand Mount

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Subversive Family

By: Ferdinand Mount

British politician and writer, Ferdinand Mount, challenges contemporary beliefs about society and family—including the history of divorce, childcare, and the concept of the nuclear family. In Subversive Family, politician and writer Ferdinand Mount argues that society is shaped by a series of powerful revolutionary movements, the leaders of which, whether they be political ideologues, theologians, feudal lords, or feminist writers, have done their utmost to render the family a subordinate instrument of their purpose but that, in spite of it all, the family endures. Mount maintains that many widely held contemporary beliefs about the family are based on a willful misreading of the evidence: among the myths are that arranged marriages were the norm until this century; that child care is a modern innovation; that in earlier societies children were treated as expendable objects; that the nuclear family is not a 20th-century invention; and that romantic love never existed before the troubador poets glorified adultery. Divorce, he contends, is no great novelty either, he shows that in many times and places it has been almost as easy to obtain as it is today. Far from diminishing the general desire and respect for family life, Mount contends that the provision for divorce has been popularly regarded as an integral part of any sensible system of family law. This study should jolt the reader into a re-assessment of one of the most familiar and ancient institutions, and encourage greater consideration for policies today that support the family.

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Page Count

302

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1451603282

ISBN 13

9781451603286

The New Few

Or a Very British Oligarchy

By: Ferdinand Mount

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The New Few

Or a Very British Oligarchy

By: Ferdinand Mount

This was supposed to be the era when democracy came into its own, but instead power and wealth in Britain have slowly been consolidated the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the country struggles financially and switches off politically. We are now ruled by a gang of fat-cats with fingers in every pie who squabble for power among themselves while growing richer. Bored with watching corrupt politicians jockeying for power, ordinary Britons are feeling disconnected from politics and increasingly cynical about the back-scratching relationship between politicians and big business. The New Fewshows us what has led to this point, and asks the critical questions: whyhas Britain become a more unequal society over the past thirty years? Whyhave the banks been bailed out with taxpayers' money, while bankers are still receiving huge bonuses? Why have those responsible not been held accountable for the financial crash? Why has power in Britain become so concentrated in the hands of corrupt politicians who have been exposed cheating their constituents in the expenses scandal? Despite this bleak diagnosis, there are solutions to the rise of the new ruling class in the modern West. The New Few sets out some of the ways in which we can restore our democracy, bringing back real accountability to British business and fairness to our society.

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Page Count

334

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1847378013

ISBN 13

9781847378019

Flora Australiensis

A Description of the Plants of the Australian Territory

By: George Bentham,Ferdinand von Mueller

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Flora Australiensis

A Description of the Plants of the Australian Territory

By: George Bentham,Ferdinand von Mueller

A seven-volume compendium, published from 1863 to 1878, of Australian flora, compiled by one of Britain's most influential botanists.

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Page Count

593

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108037410

ISBN 13

9781108037419

Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile in the Years 1840, 1841 (Complete)

By: Ferdinand Werne

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Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile in the Years 1840, 1841 (Complete)

By: Ferdinand Werne

Discoveries and conquests, which so frequently go hand in hand, are of the greatest importance to the history of mankind. Like a combination of streams, they break through natural boundaries and the rocky dams of ages, and open a way for the incessant progress of civilization through new and untrodden paths. Yet glorious enterprises, costly equipments, and hazardous exploits, may conceal a swelling kernel of material interest beneath a husk of fine reasons, as if these constituted the primitive motive. Thus Mohammed Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, has done very much for science, especially geography, without even thinking of it, whose comprehensive relations, with respect to the higher requirements of mankind, lie far beyond the limits of his ideas. Neither has he honoured with his study the hieroglyphics in the Biban el Moluk near Thebes, where the black Kushi bring golden rings as tribute to the Pharaohs. Yet he knows, and is so exceedingly fond of these rings (Okiën), which in Ethiopia even now serve instead of money, that, so far as the destroying arms of this much-famed satrap reach in Belled-Sudan, no more okiën are to be seen. Moreover, he is making exertions to follow and secure those that have retreated and eluded his grasp, which affords an excellent opportunity for extending our knowledge of the countries and people of East and Central Africa. He sacrificed his son Ismail, and, through the Defterdar, devastated and depopulated this beautiful country, merely to secure to himself the way to the gold regions; though he might have attained his object much better, had he sought to elevate the country in every possible way, and to re-establish mercantile confidence. For, from the earliest ages, a market has existed here, to which gold comes, first hand, in the leaf and grain form, by barter with the inhabitants of the interior, just as it has been separated from the sand of the torrents, and kept in quills or horns of the gazelle. In Sennaar or Kordofan it is found in rings of half and whole okiën and in gold wire, but it is frequently changed, by weighing and melting it down, into ingots or bars, which Mohammed Ali just as little contemns. But “Turks:”—in this one word is included all and every answer to questions on the condition of the people. We shrug up our shoulders, and say “Turks.” Whoever has lived some time amongst them must, from the clearest conviction, confess the perfect incapacity of these Turks for advancing and civilizing the countries under their government, and their indifference to the interests, nay, even their premeditated murder of the nations infested by them. The complete depravity of the Asiatic world, even in the lifeless and powerless form of a mass dissolved in corrupt fermentation, always effervesces strongly into cruelty with the wide-spread barbarians of the East, and displays itself in bestial vices, to the disgrace of mankind and scorn of the sacred bond of nations. A truly savage nature is theirs, which, from Montenegro to the east and south, repels all western civilization, and would seek a kind of national fame by ridiculous reactions against it, as a hated and even despised foreign state of manners and life, in order to cover their nakedness and infamy, and to cloak their empty ostentation. But the Turk of Egypt is the outcast of his countryman in Turkey itself. Egypt, for example, is so decried in Albania, on account of its corruption, that the Arnaut returning from thence seldom obtains a wife, even if he have his girdle full of red gold.

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Age

Page Count

726

Publisher

Library of Alexandria

ISBN 10

1465562915

ISBN 13

9781465562913

Book's by Ferdinand Mount

Jem (and Sam)

Jem (and Sam)

Making Nice

Making Nice

English Voices

English Voices

Full Circle

Full Circle

Kiss Myself Goodbye

Kiss Myself Goodbye

Subversive Family

Subversive Family

The New Few

The New Few

Flora Australiensis

Flora Australiensis

Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile in the Years 1840, 1841 (Complete)

Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile in the Years 1840, 1841 (Complete)

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