Piers Paul Read was born in Beaconsfield, England, the son of poet, essayist, and art critic Herbert Read and Margaret Ludwig Read. When Read was eight his family moved to the rural north of Yorkshire, the scene of Herbert Read's own childhood, which...

We first saw the old stone farmhouse on a misty day and decided against it: it required too much work. However, Emily and I returned for a second look the next morning when the mist was rising to reveal a superb view over three...

Piers Paul Read, the British novelist, went to live in France in 1979 with his wife and children. He was having trouble writing and thought it would perk him up. Naturally, he didn't get a thing done. "As soon as people knew we had...

Alec Guinness: The Authorized Biography, by Piers Paul Read. Simon & Schuster, 632 pages, $35. Most actors ramp up an exhibitionistic façade as a means of compensating for displeasure with their own core personality, but Alec Guinness was one of those rare actors...

Alec Guinness: The Authorized Biography, by Piers Paul Read. Simon & Schuster, 632 pages, $35.Most actors ramp up an exhibitionistic façade as a means of compensating for displeasure with their own core personality, but Alec Guinness was one of those rare actors who seemed not...

The sub-title of [Polonaise] should read: 'Or the Wreck of the Titanic'. Like the Titanic, the greater part of this book is a magnificent piece of engineering, a product of intelligence, great technical skill and hard work. Also like the Titanic, when the journey has almost been completed, in fact as late as page 343, Read's finely constructed artefact, of which its creator has every reason to feel proud, hits an iceberg of such shattering banality that the reader is left at the end lik...

Read does not make much of a case for Catholicism, or for religion at all, in [his early novel, The Junkers]. He writes with apparent approval of those ex-Nazis who have repented and are now (the mid-1960s) working for a unified Europe even if the unity can only be achieved by the spread of Communist principles and power…. How far have Read's views changed since he wrote The Junkers? Neither author nor main character in Read's latest novel [A Married Man] seem to have any sympathies wit...

[In A Married Man] John Strickland finds the naked body of his wife, Clare, in the living-room of their country cottage and the corpse of her hitherto unsuspected lover in the bedroom upstairs [and] it gives him a nasty turn, especially as both have been demolished by shotgun blast. But he has set his heart on becoming a labour M.P. and is soon back at the hustings although warning his agent: 'I may be a little off form.' His form declines still further when he discovers that the super-rich mi...