John James Todd, a Scotsman born in 1899 and one of the great self-appointed (and failed) geniuses of the twentieth century. This book deals with his life and work.
John James Todd, a Scotsman born in 1899 and one of the great self-appointed (and failed) geniuses of the twentieth century. This book deals with his life and work.
'Brilliant ... a Citizen Kane of a novel' Daily TelegraphMeet John James Todd-Scotsman, auteur, Rousseau-fanatic - and 'subversive element'Born in 1899, John James Todd is one of the great, failed geniuses of the last century. His reminiscences, collected in The New Confessions, take us from Edinburgh to the Western Front, the Berlin film-world in the Twenties to Hollywood in the Thirties, Forties and beyond.Suffering imprisonment, shooting, marriage, fatherhood, divorce and McCarthyism, Todd is a hostage to good fortune, ill-judgement, bad luck, the vast sweep of history and the cruel, cruel hand of fate . . .
“"An entertaining and darkly comic novel, a novel given weight and ballast by the pressure of recent history."”
--The New York Times
"Here is the rarest of books, the sort you want to read again--even before you've finished it the first time. . . . Boyd gives us a magnificent experience." --People
"Boyd has created an important and complex character in a vividly evoked series of settings. . . . He has written a subtle and provocative history of our time." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Entertaining and intellectually engaging." --Time
William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France. His most recent novel, Trio, was a Sunday Times bestseller.
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