(Twelve years after a student summer spent together in the...)
Twelve years after a student summer spent together in the country, English teacher Vanya Morozov, Tanya, a film director, idealistic Luyba, and Alik, a KGB agent, become caught up in a bureaucratic power struggle that spills over into the precincts of the Western intelligence agencies.
(Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is indisputably Russia’s gre...)
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is indisputably Russia’s greatest poet the nearest Russian equivalent to Shakespeare and his brief life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work. T.J Binyon’s biography of this brilliant and rebellious figure is ‘a remarkable achievement’ and its publication ‘a real event’.
Timothy John Binyon was an English educator, biographer and crime novelist. His most famous works are "Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction", "Swan Song" and "Greek Gifts".
Background
Timothy Binyon was born on the 18th of February, 1936 in Leeds, United Kingdom, where his father, Denis Edmund Fynes-Clinton, a nephew of the poet Laurence Binyon, lectured in Classics at the university. For some time he lived in Hebden in the West Riding, but after the outbreak of war, the family moved to London.
During the Second World War his father worked at the Board of Trade, fire watching in the evening, while his redoubtable mother, Nancy Emmerson Binyon, herself a university graduate, did a succession of jobs that took Tim and his sister, Jane, around Britain, to Suffolk, to Nottingham, and even to Cornwall, where Nancy taught at a progressive school.
Education
Young Timothy Binyon attended a very large number of schools in the South, but, following the war, when his father returned to Leeds and settled in Skipton, he was sent to Ermysted's Grammar School.
When, aged 18, doing his National Service, he was assigned to the Joint Services School for Linguists in Bodmin, Cornwall, to learn Russian. After another year of National Service, he took up his place at Exeter College, Oxford, where he received a Master's degree in 1963 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1968. Binyon wrote his doctoral dissertation on an early-20th-century poet, Valery Bryusov, and published a collection of Soviet verse. He then spent a year at Moscow University - astonishingly, his only visit to Russia.
Timothy Binyon’s first job was teaching Russian literature at Leeds University from 1962 to 1965, before returning to Oxford as a lecturer from 1965 to 2004. In 1968 Timothy began his collaboration with Wadham College. He served as Dean of Wadham during the 1970s and 80s and retired in the early 2000s.
Binyon's first novel “Swan Song” was written in 1982, drew upon his knowledge of Russian life and culture, while his second, “Greek Gifts” in 1988 shows his powers of invention and suspense at full throttle and in 1989 he wrote “Murder Will Out”.
He also reviewed crime fiction for a succession of literary editors on the London Evening Standard and some of the national papers, as well as other fiction that particularly interested him, such as the novels of Patrick O'Brian. Then, with the publication of “Pushkin” and the 2003 prize, Binyon became a literary celebrity himself.
His “Pushkin” was described as "one of the great biographies of recent times" and "the best possible tribute to the changeable and elusively fascinating character of its subject". But although it was his first substantial academic publication in his own field, Binyon's byline was already well-known to newspaper readers, chiefly as a reviewer of crime fiction, a role he undertook for several newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph and later, London's Evening Standard.
Timothy Binyon was an accomplished cook, as befitted a bon vivant. His taste in wine was impeccable, and his home-baked bread superb.
Interests
Gardening, cooking, movies (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Connections
Timothy Binyon married first, in 1974, Felicity Butterwick, acquiring four step-daughters. They also had a daughter of their own, Polly. The marriage was dissolved in 1992 and he married secondly, in 2000, Helen Ellis, head of publicity at HarperCollins. He met Helen in the Eighties, taken a part-time publishing job with Naim Attalah as crime editor at Quartet Books.