Ezra Pound’s greatness as a man of letters - poet, translator, critic, editor, pedagogue, universal correspondent - made him a central figure in the literature of the twentieth century. He was ...

W. H. Auden disapproved of literary biography. Or did he? The truth is far more equivocal than at first seems apparent. There is no denying he delivered himself of such ...

It started with Beyond the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival of 1960. Four Cambridge undergraduates, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett had created a satirical revue, which ...

Covering the period from the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Winnie-the-Pooh , Humphrey Carpenter examines the lives and writings of Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, George Macdonald, Louisa May ...

Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John Braine, Colin Wilson, John Wain - five names instantly redolent of the 1950s and the Angry Young Men phenomenon. However, as Humphrey Carpenter explores with relish ...

In Humphrey Carpenter's own words, 'This is the story of the longest-ever literary party, which went on in Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, throughout the 1920s.'

'This book', to ...

Dennis Potter’s death in 1994 deprived British television of its most controversial figure. Potter was a prolific writer of genius. Yet while his subversive television plays, such as Pennies ...

‘[ The Brideshead Generation ] has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful director.’ Evening Standard

‘Jovial ...

First published in 1992, Humphrey Carpenter's study of Benjamin Britten was hailed by Anthony Burgess in the Observer as 'one of the best biographies of a musician that I ...