A History of English Literature

Woolf is not a documentary realist – the scenes and people ofTo the Lighthouse are not those of the Isle of Skye. But the Ramsay ...

Marcel Proust. Her Mrs Ramsay, like Forster’s Mrs Wilcox and Mrs Moore, is a new kind of character – maternal, wise, detached fr ...

England in 1919 for Paris, where she married three times.The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of Present-Day Bohemian Paris, appe ...

I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, Th ...

injustice and economic problems proved false. Some liked the idea of the Communist experiment in Russia. In 1930, 107 Nazis were ...

Evelyn Waugh liked to make the provoking claim that he and Graham Greene and Anthony Powell were craftsmen producing well-made n ...

The poetry of the Thirties W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden(1907–1973) and his Oxford friends Stephen Spender (1909–1998), Louis MacNeice ( ...

mythology, wrote: ‘But all is changed, that high horse riderless’ (‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’). It is worth listening to re ...

Germany invaded Poland, Auden was ‘in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes exp ...

years. The keynote, from which she wandered, is a kind of religious despair seen from its comic side. Her best known poem ends w ...

however ironically in Persuasion or Our Mutual Friend, has gone – a casualty of war and ofthe author’s temperament. His acceptan ...

Waugh’s reputation has outlived the offence caused by the real-life charades in which he acted the part of a Duke with gout, an ...

as had a fellow-Etonian, Henry Yorke (1905–1973). As ‘Henry Green’, Yorke too wrote a series of novels, from Blindness (1929) to ...

led by Napoleon, take over the farmhouse, while the other animals stay in their pens. The noble carthorse Boxer is the revolutio ...

Newspeak remain in the mind; the hero, Winston Smith, fades. Experience in the Burma Police had turned Blair into Orwell, who em ...

children have since proved extremely popular. Narnia is full of the romance, parable and folklore Lewis had harvested. Such genr ...

also believable. Tolkien’s work has a kind of dreamlike moral innocence, a contrast to Lewis’s logic, ingenuity and cleverness. ...

that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ Sh ...

language they use, is rich and living’ (his native Ireland?) to ‘the modern literature of towns’ (Paris or London?), where we fi ...

Overview The change after 1955 is clearest in drama, where Beckett’s impact over- turned conventions. The marked change from Rat ...