The Glittering Prizes

The book is very good but the miniseries was wonderful. Tom Conti is one of my very favorite actors but very few of his TV appearances have been released on DVD and this is one of the best. What can we do to get this released?

Though much in the stories is predictable, the book's real strength is in the quality of its prose. Raphael is a master of both brio and wit. If you admire and delight in such qualities, you'll love this book as I do. I wish, like another reviewer, that the TV miniseries were available on DVD. It introduced Tom Conte to American audiences, and I think he's never been better in any of his subsequent work on film and the tube. Raphael has produced an enormous amount of excellent fiction, non-fiction, and TV and film writing. Best known among the latter are "Two for the Road," "Darling," and "Eyes Wide Shut."

This novel tells the story of a bunch of Cambridge graduates from the '50s and their journeys into adulthood and responsibility. It was made into a terrific British TV series with Tom Conti, and it reads like it was written for TV - there's tons of absolutely brilliant, witty and sparkling dialogue, but so little background information about each scene that it's sometimes tricky to keep track of which character is saying what and how specific remarks affect the people who hear them. It's worth the effort, though, because the book provides a wonderfully vivid snapshot of how a bunch of clever folks of widely varied personalities responded to the challenges of their time. These are people with well-developed social consciences, great senses of humor and a deep appreciation for their friendships, but they're also incredibly furtive and childish about sex and their education has badly under-prepared them for the exigencies of making a living, which leads many of them to become awfully cynical awfully quickly as soon as the prospects of fame and wealth start to intrude upon their intimacies.Come to think of it, these were probably the most widespread character flaws amongst the people I went to college with, back in the 1990s. Perennial problems of the educated classes, or has our civilization just been in a weird holding pattern for the past 50 years? Hmm.