- ©
- V Carew
Biography
Frederic Raphael was born in 1931 in Chicago and moved to England as a boy.
He was educated at Charterhouse School and was a major scholar in Classics at St John's College, Cambridge. He writes in several genres.
His novels include: The Earlsdon Way (1958); The Limits of Love (1960); Lindmann (1963); Like Men Betrayed (1970); Heaven and Earth (1985); A Double Life (1993); Old Scores (1995); and Coast to Coast (1998).
His collections of short stories include: The Latin Lover and other stories (1994); Think of England (1986); Oxbridge Blues and other stories (1980); and Sleeps Six and other stories (1979).
He is also well-known for his screenwriting for film and television, including Darling (1965), starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde; Far from the Madding Crowd; Two for the Road; Rogue Male; and Eyes Wide Shut. His memoir of the collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut was published in 1999 as Eyes Wide Open. His novel, The Glittering Prizes (1976), which tells the stories of a group of Cambrige undergraduates in post-war Britain, was made into a 6-part BBC television series in 1976, starring Tom Conti as hero Adam Morris, and won a Royal Television Society Award (Writer of the Year). Its sequel, Fame and Fortune (2007), was adapted for BBC Radio and broadcast on Radio 4 in 2010. The third in the trilogy, Final Demands (2010), was also broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Frederic Raphael has also written history books, including Some Talk of Alexander (2006), an overview of the ancient Greek World; translations, including The Poems of Catullus (1978); and Petronius's Satyrica. Author of many essays and articles, he is a frequent reviewer in The Literary Review, the TLS, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. He has written biographies of Byron (1982) and of Somerset Maugham (1976), and his autobiographical work includes five volumes in the Personal Terms series and the memoir, A Spoilt Boy (2003), which covers the first 18 years of his life.
He lives in France and England and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964. His radio play, A Thousand Kisses, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2011. His book of internet letters exchanged with Joseph Epstein, entitled Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet will be published in 2013, along with A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus. The sixth volume of his notebooks, There and Then, will also be published in 2013.
