Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. Yet, though often somber, the Sword of Honour trilogy is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh's early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric.

    At the center of The Magus is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where he befriends a local millionaire. The friendship soon evolves into a deadly game, in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.

    The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce's heroes are humble men."--From the Foreword by Anthony Burgess.

    He is knows as Ganga Dun to his enormous audience, and as Uncle Nick to the narrator of the story.Young Herncastle is a good-looking Yorkshire boy, ambitious as a painter, whom his uncle sweeps away from a dreary office job into the nomadic, boozy, evanescently amorous life of Variety performers on tour. With them he learns the exacting craft of the stage and avidly explores the first yearnings and triumphs of both sex and love.

    John Watson. An excellent introduction if (by some incomprehensible concatenation of events) you’ve never read a Holmes tale.Contents: Introducing Mr. Sherlock Holmes / William S. Baring-Gould — The adventure of the speckled band — A scandal in Bohemia — The Red-headed League — The adventure of the blue carbuncle — The Musgrave ritual — The naval treaty — Silver Blaze — The final problem — The adventure of the empty house — The adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans — The adventure of the dancing men — The adventure of the six Napoleons — Notes / William S. Baring-Gould

    He knew and wrote about its most memorable characters including Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Tambimuttu, Nina Hamnett and Woodrow Wyatt. He was something of a dandy and a gifted raconteur, and his life, often chaotic, and related unsentimentally by him in these memoirs, veered between the fringes of the literary establishment and occasional homelessness. Evoking a demolished era of incendiary bombs and rationing, Maclaren-Ross misses none of it and provides an anecdotal history of the place that, between the bombs, offered writers and artists a home away from home."An entertaining portrait of a wartime London seldom shown, together with six of the author's best stories." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

    S. Eliot span nearly a half century--from 1917, when he published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, to 1961, four years before his death. With the luminosity and clarity of a first-rate intellect, Eliot considers the uses of literary criticism, the writers who had the greatest influence on his own work, and the importance of being truly educated. Every thoughtful person who yearns to do more than simply get through the day will be reinforced by The Aims of Education. Other pieces include To Criticize the Critic, From Poe to Valéry, American Literature and the American Language, What Dante Means to Me, The Literature of Politics, The Classics and the Man of Letters, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, and Reflections on Vers Libre.

    

    It is the first book of a trilogy consisting of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991).[from Editors' Preface]"Laurie Lee's reminiscences of his childhood in England, The Edge of the Day, portray village life in the Cotswolds, a region west of London and north of Bath, during the era following World War I...."

    This sultry month was also a time of personal crisis for Carlyle and his wife, for Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and notably for the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. A cross-section of the close-textured life of literary London in the 1840s is tellingly portrayed. Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, the Carlyles, Monckton Milnes, the actor Macready, Mary Russell Mitford, Wordsworth and Samuel Rogers frequently met during these sweltering weeks, particularly since many of them felt constrained to give parties for the best-selling German novelist, the preposterous, one-eyed Grafin Hahn-Hahn, and her travelling companion Oberst Baron Adolph von Bystram.The secret crises and decisive actions of the members of this group affected them all, as did the weather and the political situation. The catastrophe which overcomes Haydon is, however, the central leitmotif. A fascinating and stimulating book based on contemporary letters, diaries, memoirs and newspapers, A Sultry Month pioneered a new form of group biography when it was first published in l965, which has since influenced many writers and scholars.

    It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind of one philosopher-don, Stephen, who has second thoughts about what constitutes an "accident," Mosley gives us an unforgettable view of life at the top or tip of the academic heights, in addition to a moving story of love and betrayal.