First Folio [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONIn this collection, fifteen of today's finest writers introduce bookswhich hold enormous significance for them - and although some ofthe choices might at first seem surprising, all are eminently fitting. Thethemes are eternal - war, power, love, childhood, nostalgia, heroesand anti-heroes, the influence of travel and experience of differingcultures, the circumlocutions of the human brain and the arguablygreater complexities of the human heart.'Between the more or less, of course, is where fiction usuallyhappens,' writes John Sutherland on one of the most powerfulindictments of war ever produced - Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut drew on his own eyewitness experiences of thedecimation of Dresden, commenting later that 'all organic thingswere consumed' in the 1945 mass bombing of the German city. AsSutherland points out, Slaughterhouse-Five is 'like a fly trapped in ablob of amber it is very much a novel of its time, the 1960s'. Butwhat a novel.Just over seventy years before Vonnegut, H. G. Wells was invent-ing a new genre of writing - science fiction. In perhaps his mostfamous work, The War of the Worlds, Wells's late nineteenth-centurydepiction of a tranquil Surrey at the mercy of an alien invasion - withWells its lower middle-class hero - seems eerily prescient of twenty-first-century Britain. According to Iain Sinclair, The War of the Worldsalso 'anticipates the hopelessness of coming ecological disaster, riverschoked with red weed'; a time when society understands that 'terroris a given, part of the human contract', and in so doing, the book'makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable'.A sixteenth-century political theorist who turned his own disgracedexile to his advantage and formulated a timeless treatise on statecraft,in which an Italian saviour repels foreign usurpers - look no furtherthan Niccoló Machiavelli. And his relevance to our own period ofhistory? As Tim Parks so cogently puts it: 'After the obvious parallelshave sprung to mind, and we have marvelled at how applicable theRenaissance writer's precepts still are, the further surprise is our