Bulwer Lytton
Bulwer Lytton

Author: Leslie Mitchell

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2003-05-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0826421660

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After a prolific life as an author with a European reputation, outselling Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton was ennobled and, on his death, buried in Westminster Abbey. Since the First World War, however, his literary reputation has sunk and he is now little read. Bulwer Lytton is the first modern biography of an extraordinary man whose literary output was prodigious. It ranged from novels, such as The Last Days of Pompeii, and poetry to plays, biographies and extensive political commentaries and journalism. A dandy to rival Disraeli, he lived life in London, at Knebworth, his country house, or more frequently abroad, with hectic intensity. Arousing strong emotions in public, his private life was turbulent in the extreme; his acrimonious and bitter divorce from his wife Rosina providing one of the most public and prolonged marital disputes of the period. Despite this, he became Secretary for the Colonies in 1858 and was responsible for the setting up of Queensland. Leslie Mitchell's biography, written to mark the two hundredth anniversary of Bulwer Lytton's birth, is an account of an eminent and very remarkable Victorian.

Gentle Regrets
Gentle Regrets

Author: Roger Scruton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1472927850

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Roger Scruton is Britain's best known intellectual dissident, who has defended English traditions and English identity against an official culture of denigration. Although his writings on philosophical aesthetics have shown him to be a leading authority in the field, his defence of political conservatism has marked him out in academic circles as public enemy number one. Whether it is Scruton's opinions that get up the nose of his critics, or the wit and erudition with which he expresses them, there is no doubt that their noses are vastly distended by his presence, and constantly on the verge of a collective sneeze. Contrary to orthodox opinion, however, Roger Scruton is a human being, and Gentle Regrets contains the proof of it - a quiet, witty but also serious and moving account of the ways in which life brought him to think what he thinks, and to be what he is. His moving vignettes of his childhood and later influences illuminate this book. Love him or hate him, he will engage you in an argument that is both intellectually stimulating and informed by humour.

Spike Milligan: Man of Letters
Spike Milligan: Man of Letters

Author: Spike Milligan

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2013-10-03

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0241966930

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Spike Milligan's letters contain some of the best material he ever wrote . . . Collected here for the first time are the funniest, rudest and most revealing of them - most of which have never been seen before - from one of the greatest comics of the twentieth century to some of its most famous politicians, actors, celebrities and rock stars (as well as a host of unlikely individuals on some surprising subjects): - rounded teabags ('what did you do with the corners?') - backless hospital gowns ('beyond my comprehension') - heartfelt apologies ('pardon me for being alive') and the imbalance of male and female ducks in London's parks. Here, then, is the real Spike Miligan: obsessive, rude, generous and relentlessly witty. 'Milligan's zaniness shines through' Telegraph 'The godfather of alternative comedy' Eddie Izzard Spike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he served in the Royal Artillery during WWII in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, before joining forces with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe to form the legendary Goon Show. Until his death in 2002, he had success as on stage and screen and as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories.

The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters
The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

Author: Norma Clarke

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-02-08

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1446444988

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If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men: Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century. Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.

Man of Letters
Man of Letters

Author: Charles Reilly

Publisher: Outskirts Press

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1977216293

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Charles Reilly, the most prolific published letter writer in the history of the "Los Angeles Times" newspaper, has compiled the best of his letters along with commentary and essays into this collection of his work. He covers the gamut of politics, sports and the arts with his unique insight and analysis. "Charles Reilly's 'Man of Letters' is an outstanding collection of his published submissions to the 'Los Angeles Times'. Timely, reflective, the good, the bad and the ugly. No quarter given, no quarter asked. A great read." -Gary Linderer, Author of "Eyes Behind the Lines" and "Phantom Warriors." "Charles Reilly might not want to be called a scholar, but he is one-and a good one. He is an excellent writer and fearlessly writes what he thinks. Though I may sometimes disagree with some part of what he writes, he always makes me think and often helps me change my mind. He not only writes what he thinks, but he always knows well the things he writes about." -Kenn Miller - Author of "Six Silent Men: Book Two" and "Tiger the Lurp Dog."

No, Not Bloomsbury
No, Not Bloomsbury

Author: Malcolm Bradbury

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780231067263

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This first volume of Bradbury's collected critical writings concentrates on British fiction since 1945. It is written from the center of the field it surveys: Bradbury is a writer who is also a critic, a critic who is also a writer. He often feels a conflict between the two roles, but writes in a personal, lucid, and amusing style, alert to modern critical theory yet at the same time deeply involved as a creative novelist.

Sir Andrew Macphail
Sir Andrew Macphail

Author: Ian Ross Robertson

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2008-10-17

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0773574956

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Sir Andrew Macphail (1864-1938), a professor of the history of medicine at McGill University, was best-known as an essayist of international renown and founding editor of The University Magazine and the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

That Shakespeherian Rag
That Shakespeherian Rag

Author: Terence Hawkes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1136562370

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First published in 1986. This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which our society 'processes' Shakespeare and the purposes for which this seems to be done. The case is made by examining the work of four highly influential critics: A C Bradley, Walter Raleigh, T S Eliot and John Dover Wilson. Terence Hawkes asks whether, beyond the readings to which the plays may be subjected, there lies any final, authoritative or essential meaning to which we can ultimately turn, concluding that jazz music offers the most fruitful model for twentieth-century criticism.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

Author: Stephen Greenblatt

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-09-14

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 1448182611

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Selected as a book of the year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times What is it about Adam and Eve’s story that fascinates us? What does it tell us about how our species lives, dies, works or has sex? The mythic tale of Adam and Eve has shaped conceptions of human origins and destiny for centuries. Stemming from a few verses in an ancient book, it became not just the foundation of three major world faiths, but has evolved through art, philosophy and science to serve as the mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. In a quest that begins at the dawn of time, Stephen Greenblatt takes us from ancient Babylonia to the forests of east Africa. We meet evolutionary biologists and fossilised ancestors; we grapple with morality and marriage in Milton’s Paradise Lost; and we decide if the Fall is the unvarnished truth or fictional allegory.

Literary Journalism in British and American Prose
Literary Journalism in British and American Prose

Author: Doug Underwood

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1476676216

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The debate surrounding "fake news" versus "real" news is nothing new. From Jonathan Swift's work as an acerbic, anonymous journal editor-turned-novelist to reporter Mark Twain's hoax stories to Mary Ann Evans' literary reviews written under her pseudonym, George Eliot, famous journalists and literary figures have always mixed fact, imagination and critical commentary to produce memorable works. Contrasting the rival yet complementary traditions of "literary" or "new" journalism in Britain and the U.S., this study explores the credibility of some of the "great" works of English literature.