Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

'The manager's name was Love. His first-floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers.'

So begins the extraordinary life story of one of Britains most celebrated writers, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a journey from Chicago to Putney, to Charterhouse, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Hollywood and France, recording experiences that were absorbed in his opulent novels and screenplays. Raphael is the author of over twenty novels, the most celebrated being The Glittering Prizes and its sequels, following the aspirations and changing lives of a group of Cambridge students through to middle age.

The Glittering Prizes became a critically acclaimed six-part BBC television series for which Raphael would win a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award. He also won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling.

Going Up is a dazzling piece of virtuoso prose writing that is fabulously indiscreet but also deeply moving, and punctuated throughout by Raphael's indefatigable wit and incomparable erudition.

384 pages, Hardcover

First published June 16, 2015

About the author

Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.

Reviews

[Jarrod Sio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Self-aggrandising and meaningful only to Raphael’s hangers-on, 'Going Up' is interesting inasmuch as it focuses on Cambridge in general and St John's in particular. Beyond that, the memoir is best read and then relegated to a dusty recess of Raphael’s family library - hopefully never to see the light of day again.