RIP David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), A True Man of Letters Whose Work Revealed Anti-Semitism in the UK

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January 11, 2026 Update

As an addenda to the tribute below I published last month about British man-of-letter David Pryce-Jones, in which I mentioned that he and actress Helena Bonham-Carter were cousins, I want now to share an article by Juliet Conway in the Daily Mail that highlights their close relationship:

“Helena has long credited David’s 2015 memoir Fault Lines with helping her understand the dramatic history behind the ‘melting pot’ that is her maternal heritage.

The book recounts life at Royaumont with Helena’s maternal grandparents, Eduardo Propper de Callejon – the Spanish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews by issuing illegal visas – and his wife Helene, known as Bubbles, an Austrian-Jewish heiress from the Springer industrial dynasty.

‘It would make a great sitcom or drama,’ Helena has said of the family’s wartime adventures. ‘There were so many characters, so dramatic and funny and bonkers. And David captured it all.’

His death marks the passing of the last of a generation whose real-life dramas—wartime heroism, family feuds, literary scandals —were as vivid as anything in Netflix’s The Crown, in which the actress played Princess Margaret.

And as Helena once joked: ‘I’d have to approach [Crown writer] Peter Morgan. “I’ve got a whole other family story for you. Forget the fifth, and sixth seasons [of The Crown]. You’re coming with me, mate.”‘
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December 17, 2025

I was saddened by the recent passing of David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), which I read about in a Times of London obituary. (It’s linked to here, though you may hit a paywall, so I’ve also pasted it in below in five sequential screenshots.) We became acquainted via letters and email, beginning in 2023, though never met in person. I had sent him a letter after discovering his books thanks to a biography, The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing by Thomas Harding. Harding’s book on the dynamic British publisher Lord Weidenfeld (1919-2016) was not a cradle-to-grave biography, but instead devoted a chapter to a dozen or so of the most important books Weidenfeld published in his prolific career, some of which courted controversy; among them were Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Watson and Crick’s The Double Helix, Nabokov’s Lolita, and a writer who was then new to me, David Pryce-Jones and his nonfiction book Unity Mitford, a Quest, published in 1976.

One of the five Mitford sisters, Unity had a notorious romance with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. For writing about her life some members of the Mitford family sued Pryce-Jones for libel, intent on suppressing the book, while some upper crust Brits inveighed against Pryce-Jones for spotlighting deep currents of anti-semitism in British society; he was Jewish, and as a three-year old had been evacuated from France through Dunkirk where he was when WWII began. Weidenfeld and Pryce-Jones were faced with a decision to halt publication, or go forward, despite the threat of significant monetary damages if they lost in court. They refused to back down, the book was published, and Pryce-Jones was vindicated; it is still in print today.

I found the whole story of his family, told in the memoir Fault Lines, quite inspirational, particularly the actions of his maternal grandfather, a Spanish diplomat named Eduardo Propper de Callejón who during WWII, defied contrary orders from the Franco government and used his diplomatic portfolio to sign visas for refugees; his bravery warrants a place for him alongside the heroic exploits of the American journalist Varian Fry, who helped rescue Jews in France, and the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who signed visas for many in Lithuania. Indeed, Propper de Callejón is honored at Yad Vashem. Among David’s relatives was the British actress Helena Bonham-Carter, also a grandchild of the Spanish diplomat. She explores the WWII period in this interview on youtube. Among the people her and David’s grandfather saved was the person who later started Unicef.

The Times of London obit explains that he had a complicated relationship with his father Alan Pryce-Jones, who was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The elder Pryce-Jones can be seen in a fascinating interview he conducted with W. Somerset Maugham in 1955, also on youtube. The Maugham interview, which my adult son and business partner M. G. Turner discovered during Covid, led to me recognizing the name of David Pryce-Jones when I encountered it in Thomas Harding’s book on Lord Weidenfeld.

David was a true person of letters, the likes of which there are few today, among men or women. He was a foreign correspondent, memoirist, essayist, novelist, biographer, and devoted letter writer. Another book of his that I enjoyed enormously was Signatures, in which he tells the stories behind the many inscribed books that populated the bookshelves in his personal library, chronicling more than ninety literary relationships in his life, among them with W. H. Auden, Beryl Bainbridge, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Paul Bowles, Cyril Connolly, Martha Gellhorn, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Kazin, Amos Elon, Philip Glazebrook, Arthur Koestler, Jessica Mitford, V. S. Naipaul, Edna O’Brien, Alan Sillitoe, Muriel Spark, J. B. Priestley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hugh Nissenson, and Dame Rebecca West, among many others. It is an extraordinarily enjoyable book. Just two pages from the Table of Contents are shown below in blue type. He led an extraordinary life, and was a kind man. RIP. 

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Recently Published, Alexis Greene’s “Shakespeare Theatre Company: The History of a Classical Theatre”

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A treasured author of Philip Turner Book Productions is Alexis Greene (Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater, Applause Books, 2021) who this fall published a fantastic book for which we were proud to arrange publication; it will make an ideal gift for lovers of the Bard, the written word and the theatrical arts. The book is Shakespeare Theatre Company: The History of a Classical Theatre (Peter Randall Publishers, September 2025). It’s a sumptuous, coffee-table book that tells the engaging story of how this nonprofit theatre in Washington, DC, became one of America’s foremost centers for the performing arts. Illustrated with more than 250 dramatic photographs of productions and performers, Greene’s history takes readers from the earliest performances of Shakespeare in America; through the establishment of the Folger Shakespeare Library; the founding of the enthralling Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC); and its current role as a theatre that embraces Shakespeare, as well as other classical playwrights and contemporary dramatists. This unique history was envisioned and commissioned by longtime supporter of the STC, Lawrence Hough to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the company. Ewan Turner and I were honored to edit the text with Alexis Greene, as well.

Shakespeare Theatre Company was recently featured in Washington Unbound, linked to here, and Alexis was interviewed for the same publication in “A Glimpse Behind the Scene of One of Washington’s Finest Theaters.”

Actors and theatre professionals have praised the book, with comments like this:

“I am utterly fascinated by Alexis Greene’s superb account of Washington, D.C. Shakespeare Theatre Company’s existence. She highlights its leadership under five very different artistic directors as well as its operation from small to big physical homes, never failing to convey a vivid personal sense of the actors, directors, and writers that are involved in each decade of its productions. She doesn’t shrink from quoting the good and less-than-good reviews they encountered and gently threads her own feelings about the long-overdue employment of women directors. A volume worthy of a special place on your bookshelf.” Gail Merrifield Papp, author of Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater.

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For Halloween, “Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse” by M. G. Turner

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My dad and I share an affinity for the legendary literary character Faust, who in various retellings over the centuries has been depicted as selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a number of enticing rewards, including immortal life, admiration from the public, endless amounts of money, and much more. For Philip, this interest goes back to his student days, when with a professor named Donald Sheehan he took a course at Franconia College called “Faust,” and wrote a paper on the topic. Then a few years ago, I undertook the writing of what I call a “novella in verse” which retells the Faust legend for our modern times. With these materials in hand we decided to publish another in the series of chapbooks I’ve brought out this year under our Riverside Press imprint (preceded by Dreams of the Romantics and Roman Visions), using my pen name M. G. Turner. Collected with the narrative poem are two other devilish tales I’ve written, “The Tale of Hanns Drumpf” and “Johann Fust: Patron of Gutenberg,” plus Philip’s essay from 1974, “Faust: Man and Myth.” We believe all this writing goes well together and are now happy to announce publication of Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse for Halloween. For those who would like to buy a copy from us directly before we begin distributing it online, we are selling them for 13 dollars plus 5 dollars shipping.

To learn a little more about our new title, here is the back cover copy:

The “Faust” legend is as old as time, as is the proverbial “deal with the devil.” In M. G. Turner’s Reader Faustus this idea is brought into a modern context, as a young poet chooses to sell his soul in exchange for the power to read every book ever written. While Turner’s “novella in verse” hearkens back to Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1601), Goethe’s Faust (1808), and Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947)—Reader Faustus zeroes in on today’s zeitgeist, in which people feel burdened to consume endless content, and who see Faustian bargains all around them, in politics, technology, science, and the arts. Readers of the macabre will surely enjoy this new offering, a veritable museum of Faust, from the author of Dreams of the Romantics.

I’m honored to have received two endorsements in advance of publication:

“The Faust legend is ever regenerative and ever redefined, as seen in M. G. Turner’s beguiling new verse tale Reader Faustus. In elegant, Augustan rhyming couplets, Turner tells the story of the devil’s bargain anew, but with a focus on the wages of modernity, when those who create are cursed by having to consume ever more content. Clever, thoughtful, and fun, Reader Faustus uses classical language to speak to very contemporary problems.”—Ed Simon, author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and Editor of Belt Magazine

“M. G. Turner’s richly imaginative Reader Faustus offers a new twist on the devil’s bargain. In verse both erudite and playful, Turner asks us to reflect on what we might offer in exchange for our pursuit of both knowledge and enjoyment. While Turner takes glee in the use of antique language and form, the poem is also uncannily modern, as it proposes a complex relationship between the ability to consume content and the ability to create content—a relationship that is always under negotiation, and which has become particularly fraught in our digital age. As Turner’s work recognizes, the stakes for this bargain have never been higher.”—Brandon Grafius, author of Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture 

We hope you find the Faust legend as compelling as we do, and will be interested in visiting, and reading, our “veritable museum of Faust.” Please let us know!

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Powerful Endorsements for “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

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September 15, 2025 update:

Along with all the terrific endorsements the author and publisher have received for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard (shown below), we now also have an enthusiastic Publishers Weekly review (“A perceptive account of a prolific and celebrated artist.”), which was quickly shared by the proprietor of the popular Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook**, where it’s generating more enthusiasm and pre-orders ahead of the book’s launch on November 4.
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As announced previously on this website, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard, the first biography of the notable American author, will be published on November 4, 2025, in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook by Blackstone Publishing. The book has garnered powerful endorsements so far, from writers Gretel Ehrlich, Rebecca Solnit, Colum McCann, Carl Hiassen, John Matteson, William Souder, and Jim Fergus, as shown below.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, here are links for doing so:

Bookshop.org (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support  independent bookstores), 2) Barnes & Noble, 3) Books-A-Million, and 4) Amazon.
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Advance Praise for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard

“Devouring Time is a massive achievement, a deep plunge into the life of Jim Harrison whose 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry line our shelves. Atavistic, inspired, despairing, gluttonous, turbo-charged, and broken-hearted, the gut strings of what drove Harrison are plucked, page by page until his high-wire obsessions, his “beggar’s banquets” of eating, drinking, traveling, and writing finally recede. What lasts are the words.”—Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

“Jim Harrison is and always will be one of my great heroes. He emerges from Todd Goddard’s splendid Devouring Time in vivid technicolor, and indeed shadow, as if he could walk off the page at any moment, sounding out his American yawp. Gracefully rendered and impeccably researched, Goddard intimately charts the free-flowing river that was Harrison’s life, its headwaters and tributaries, the glistening shallows and eddies, and the dark charging currents that carved channels through the literary landscape. His timeless poetry and fiction, singular joie de vivre, boundless appetites and intellect, as well as his unerring commitment to wisdom and wildness, resound on every page. One of our most cherished writers, Jim Harrison has landed in the hands of a worthy biographer. An absolute pleasure to read, Devouring Time resonates with me still.”—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

“My friend Jim Harrison always seemed a fiercely untameable subject for a biographer, but I think Devouring Time will stand as a complete and moving portrait. Jim was one of those rare writers whose private life was as adventurous as their works, but only a dogged journalist could have tracked down all the tales. Todd Goddard tells the whole story in a way that Jim would have admired – raw and revealing, yet with a sensitive eye for both the pain and the talent that made Jim one of modern America’s most intriguing poets and novelists.”—Carl Hiaasen, author of Bad Monkey and Fever Beach

[caption id="attachment_18927" align="alignright" width="202"] Jim Harrison, Paris, 1971. Credit: Dan Gerber[/caption]

“Jim Harrison lived a big life, and he has long deserved a gargantuan biography, both in size and spirit. And this is what Todd Goddard has given us. All by itself, the meticulously rendered story of how Harrison’s prose masterpiece Legends of the Fall came into being would be ample reward for the curious reader. But Goddard has given us immeasurably more. Impeccably researched, sensitively written, Devouring Time gives us a man — one who experienced the very depths of pain but found there the building blocks of enduring art. Cruelly battered by adversity, Harrison nevertheless infused his world with transcendent song. Read in conjunction with his own work, Devouring Time completes his testament.”—John Matteson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

“A feast of a biography that does full justice to a writer whose vast appetites…for books, food, sex, success, and a life in the wild…fueled a prodigious and prolific talent. Sweeping yet judicious, written with grace and restraint, Devouring Time deftly captures a life that veered between exhilaration and despair, impoverishment and acclaim. A keen-eyed and sensitive interpreter of Harrison’s writing, especially his poetry, Todd Goddard also grapples with his subject’s manifold excesses and insecurities. Harrison’s long marriage to his wife Linda, to whom he was serially unfaithful but never faithless, anchored his tempestuous personality. Their often-challenged devotion to each other is the beating heart of this moving portrayal of an artist who craved domesticity but could never live entirely within its boundaries. An exquisite, indelible book.”—William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“Let me just say upfront that any other writers who are working on, and/or planning to write a biography about the life and times of poet/novelist Jim Harrison, I would suggest that you hang up your pens and pencils, fold up your laptops, and turn your literary attentions elsewhere. Todd Goddard here delivers the most definitive possible such work, a book brilliantly constructed, comprehensive and artfully written.

I was a close friend of Jim Harrison’s for thirty-seven years (among, of course, many others) right up until the evening of his death. I thought in that time (as many of us did) that I had heard virtually all of Jim’s stories, some more than once, for he was a consummate storyteller, frequently with alternate versions of his tales, and never too shy to talk about himself.

Herein are the rich details of the life and career of one of America’s sometimes overlooked literary geniuses, a man devoted to his art, who pushed his talents, and body, to the limit, from the rarefied world of poetry, to fiction and novels, to screenplays on the other end of the spectrum. Along the way, the reader will learn a great deal about the complicated and sometimes cutthroat literary and film businesses, as well as meet a vast array of friends, family members and colleagues who peopled Jim’s world.

There are no punches pulled here; like so many creative geniuses, Jim Harrison had his dark side, fueled by alcoholism of which he himself was more than well aware. This is a big book, and not just in size, that tells the story of an extraordinary character unlike any other, a man so totally out of the ordinary, that those of us who knew him personally, forgive him all his excesses, remember his humor and generosity, and will miss his presence on earth until the day we die.”—Jim Fergus, author of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

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Excitedly Anticipating Publication of “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

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May 27 2025 update:

For fans of Jim Harrison eager to have their copy of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life as soon as possible upon publication November 4, 2025, please click through to the websites of major book retailers below, using the pre-order/buy buttons provided:

1) Bookshop.org/for pre-ordering Devouring Time (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support many independent bookstores)  2) Barnes & Noble/for pre-ordering Devouring Time   3) Books-A-Million/for pre-ordering Devouring Time  4) Amazon

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May 22, 2025
As reported on this website in April 2020, for our author client Todd Goddard, Philip Turner Book Productions sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life to Blackstone Publishing. Due to the pandemic, a number of key archives were inaccessible for 2-3 years but the author persevered and his book, the first biography of the protean American writer—beloved to readers for his poetry, many novellas, full-length novels, and essays that covered the gamut from food to fishing to foreign locales—will be published in hardcover, ebook, and as an audiobook on November 4, 2025. You can see the cover image from the advanced reading copy (ARC) that is being distributed to bookstores, book critics, and literary journalists, and the back cover copy.

Things are setting up very well for the book, with this enthusiastic blurb already received from the author and activist Rebecca Solnit, who writes that,

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all”— Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

The biography of Jim Harrison (1937-2016) unfolds across a number of key places, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, his home state, to the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village, to Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France. In the archives, Todd Goddard found a rich record of correspondence, including many letters with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane. Goddard is an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, has taught Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference.

We have some ARCs available, so let me know, if you or someone you know—a bookseller say, or a reviewer—wants one because of the sort of books they read, carry, and write about, including Harrison’s own poetry, essays, and novellas, the latter being a form he excelled at beyond any fiction writer of his era. 

This week, Harrison’s classic 1989 poetry collection, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, has been reissued in a new edition from his longtime poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press. In advance of that, Todd Goddard, Rebecca Solnit, and Jamie Harrison, one of Jim’s daughters, took part in an online discussion of the book with Copper Canyon publisher Joseph Bednarik. In addition, Copper Canyon printed a sweet little broadside for The Theory and Practice of Rivers, which I was delighted to receive in the mail, as shown in the photo gallery below. The republication of The Theory and Practice of Rivers is timely in that it happens to coincide with the publication this week of Is a River Alive?  by another of my favorite writers on nature and landscape, Robert Macfarlane. Taken together the two books are sure to bring renewed attention to our riverine world.

And if you’re looking to join an online community of folks who treasure Jim Harrison’s work, I suggest you can join the Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where I appreciate that this post is being widely shared.

All in all, it’s shaping up to be a banner year for the indomitable Jim Harrison!

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Sold: “First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy,” a memoir by Donna Chaffee

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As literary agent, I’m very pleased to have sold First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy, a memoir by Donna Chaffee, to Usher Morgan of Library Tales, a new publisher for me.

One of the reasons I’m optimistic for Ms Chaffee’s book, and the publicity it’s likely to attract, is that I sense a backlash brewing to RFK Jr.’s controversial tenure in the Trump administration. The same day we announced Donna’s book in Publishersmarketplace, it was also announced that Kerry Kennedy, sister of RFK Jr., is going to publish Ethel: Faith, Hope, Family, and an Extraordinary American Life, a biography of her mother Ethel Skakel Kennedy, written with Maryanne Vollers, with the Harper One imprint; by coincidence, as editor I earlier published a book with Kerry Kennedy, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders  Who Are Changing the World (Crown Publishing, 2000) which shows her commitment to social justice and human rights. I think there will be a good synergy between the new books by the two women, Donna and Kerry.

I am reminded that during the 2024 campaign for the presidency, many Kennedy family members expressed opposition to, and unease with RFK Jr holding high office. With him now installed in the federal government, I believe the Kennedys will continue providing counterweights to the shameful example being set by their dangerous sibling and close relative, especially in contrast to his father.

As to Donna Chaffee’s book itself, it is a rare personal account of the charismatic Senator whose life was abbreviated so tragically.. The memoir covers the years Chaffee knew and worked with RFK, from the time he became a member of the Senate in January 1965, through his run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, and his murder that June. Over the decades she retained a lot of material from that time, including photographs, and has remained a member of the close-knit community of Kennedy family friends and associates. Her book will be published on June 6, 2026, 58th anniversary of the assassination.

Following the Senator’s death, Chaffee received a degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley and embarked upon a career in public service, working for more than 20 years as a financial manager for the County of Los Angeles. Since her retirement, she has become actively involved in cheetah conservation in Africa and traveled the world, visiting more than seventy countries.

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