Author Description

I: English literature. The genius of Shandy Hall: Laurence Sterne; Double life: Jane Austen; Best and worst: Charles Dickens; Living with Trollope: Anthony Trollope; Eminent Victorian: George Eliot; The two Hardys: Thomas Hardy; The King's trumpeter: Rudyard Kipling; Life in the head: John Cowper Powys; Nothing nasty in the woodshed: P.G. Wodehouse; Like ink and milk: D.H. Lawrence; Baby face: William Gerhardie; The last Puritan: George Orwell; Mr. Toad: Evelyn Waugh; God's Greene: Graham Greene -- II: The English poets. Family man: William Wordsworth; Unmisgiving: John Keats; The all-star Victorian: Alfred, Lord Tennyson; An art of self-discovery: Edward Thomas; Fun while it lasted: Rupert Brooke; Gallant pastiche: Cecil Day Lewis; The best of Betjeman: John Betjeman; The flight of the disenchanter: W.H. Auden; The last romantic: Philip Larkin -- III: Mother Russia. Cutting it short: Alexander Pushkin; Under the overcoat: Nikolai Gogol; The strengths of his passivity: Ivan Turgenev; An excellent man: Anton Chekhov; The backward look: Ivan Bunin; Poems with a heroine: Anna Akhmatova; A poet's tragedy: Marina Tsvetaeva; On the horse parsnip: Boris Pasternak; The hard hitter: Isaac Babel; A prig of genius: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- IV: American poetry. Songs of a furtive self: Walt Whitman; Mothermonsters and fatherfigures: E.E. Cummings; Lowellship: Robert Lowell; "One life, one writing": James Merrill; Richly flows contingency: John Ashbery -- V: Out of Eastern Europe. The power of delight: Bruno Schulz; Something childish: Witold Gombrowicz; Poet of holy dread: Paul Celan; The art of austerity: Zbigniew Herbert; Return of the native: Czeslaw Milosz -- VI: Aspects of novels. The point of novels; Gossip in fiction; Little green crabs: Marcel Proust; The order of battle at Trafalgar; In which we serve: Patrick O'Brian; Seer of the ego: Stendhal; What will you do to keep the s