David Caute has a reputation as both a novelist and a historian. He has written plays, including works for radio and television, as well as essays and journalistic pieces. A writer who combines sophisticated and wide-ranging experiments in the techniques of the modern novel with a strong commitment to left-wing political issues, and who brings a wide knowledge of European (particularly French) intellectual traditions into English fiction, he is one of the most intellectually stimulating novelists of recent decades in England--a "public" rather than a "private" writer.

John David Caute was born in 1936 in Alexandria, where his father, an army dentist, was stationed at the time. He was the only child of British parents who were themselves of mixed descent. His father came from French and Irish Catholic families. Because the elder Caute was repeatedly transferred by the army to different parts of the world (leaving his family...