Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of Scrutiny, which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world. The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from Scrutiny, including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his deeply-felt engagement with Shakespeare, and his severe strictures on attempts to import sociology and political activism into the study of literature. The title of the book comes from a passage in Eliot's 'The Function of Criticism', in which the poet argues that the critic must engage in 'the common pursuit of true judgment'. For Leavis, this meant a strenuous insistence on discriminatory criticism - clear statements about what is good and morally mature and admirable, and equally clear condemnation of what is trivial. The Common Pursuit, with its controversial judgments of Bunyan and Auden, Swift and Forster, remains as challenging now as it did in 1952, and it is easy to see why Leavis - who was never offered a professorship by Cambridge University - held such sway over the study of English literature in his time.

A panoramic novel that stretches from 1912 to 1967 No Laughing Matter is perhaps Angus Wilson's most autobiographical novel. The novel chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six Matthews children and their dysfuntional middle-class family. Their parents - Billy Pop and the Countess - are objects of ridicule to their children who vow never to make their mistakes. Quentin, the eldest, is a socialist who adores women. His fervent views, however, become distilled over the years until he transforms into a cynical TV pundit. Gladys, plump and amenable, is unlucky in love and eventually falls for the charms of a crook. Rupert, the handsome actor, has a successful career until he fails to adapt to the changing theatre. Margaret is a brilliant and highly acclaimed novelist but she becomes bitter as her twin Sukey sinks into domestic bliss, while Marcus, the baby of the family, believes that his career is his life. An ambitious and enriching novel No Laughing Matter is an extraordinary work in its depictions of complex family relationships, where it is just as easy to hate as to love and where everyone struggles to be an individual.

Farmer's Glory was first published in 1932. It was A. G. Street's first book and remains his most famous. In his own modest words 'This book is simply an attempt to give a pen picture of farming life in Southern England and Western Canada.' It succeeds memorably.Compton Mackenzie, reviewing it in the Daily Mail, wrote, 'Let me recommend it to the general public as a model of unpretentious English, an enthralling picture of rural life on both sides of the Atlantic, a manual of deadly common sense, and a thing of beauty. It will go on the shelf of my library with Cobbett's Rural Rides and White's Natural History of Selborne'. The comment about 'unpretentious English' is interesting. So exemplary was it considered to be in that respect, Cambridge University selected it as one of its set books for what was then School Certificate. His daughter, Pamela Street, marvelled at that, remembering he left school at the age of fifteen.'A classic within that special genre of country-writing ... a wealth of fine detail and anecdote ... the author's voice and personality come through with an undimmed vividness - shrewd, dogged, humorous and charged with the warmth of humanity.' Desmond Hawkins, Country Life

The humour of self-deprecation is peculiarly English. Few people do it better than Jeremy Lewis. His first two autobiographical volumes - Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits - are being reissued in Faber Finds to coincide happily with his third volume - Grub Street Irregular - being published by HarperCollins.With a sharp eye for the absurd and a fond sympathy for life's eccentrics, in Playing for Time, Jeremy Lewis treats us to uproarious tales from his time in Dublin in the 1960s, mad escapades in Europe and America, life amidst the snares and delusions involved in growing up in middle-class England in the 1950s, and of his ever unrequited passion for the ever unattainable ffenella.Richard Cobb enjoyed this book so much he managed to review it twice, a quote from one will do.'I like books that make me laugh, and Jeremy Lewis's Playing for Time kept me laughing every night in my local for a week'.

There is no shortage of books on the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of 1915 but this one stands out. In it Geoffrey Moorhouse moves the focus from the more familar aspects to concentrate on one small mill town, Bury, in Lancashire, and to anatomize the long-lasting effect the Dardanelles had on it. Bury was the regimental home of the Lancashire Fusiliers. In the Gallipoli landings of 25 April 1915 it lost a large proportion of its youth. By May 1915, some 7,000 Bury men had already gone to war, to be followed by many others before Armistice Day. More than 1,600,from just three local battalions of the Fusiliers were among those who never returned. The regiment left 1,816 dead men on Gallipoli alone: it lost 13,642 soldiers in the Great War as a whole.This terrifying sacrifice left its mark. Bury commemorates Gallipoli on a scale similar to Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand and yet as the Second World War approached, recruitment to the regiment fell far behind that in other Lancashire towns. 'Hurtles one from rage and cynicism to involvement and tenderness . . . Moorhouse offers one of the most fascinating revelations of the orthodox British spirit, religious, political and social . . . This book makes wonderful reading.' Ronald Blythe, Sunday Times 'A fascinating new approach to this tragedy . . . Moorhouse's contribution (to the bibliography of Gallipoli) is of quite outstanding value.' Robert Rhodes James, The Independent 'A subtle and moving exploration of the way that memories of slaughter and loss shaped the town's post-first world war identity.' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman

Unfinished Adventure, published in 1933, is Evelyn Sharp's autobiography. It is a remarkable book recounting a remarkable life. Born in 1869, Evelyn Sharp was the sister of the folk song and dance expert, Cecil Sharp. A journalist, writer, pacifist and suffragist, Evelyn Sharp writes vividly about all aspects of her life: her school-days, Paris in 1890 , the Yellow Book, the Manchester Guardian, her conversion to Suffragism, her imprisonment in Holloway, her war work, her relief work in Germany and Russia in the nineteen-twenties, and finally, in her own words, 'The Greatest of All Adventures': the day she completed this book she married the campaigning writer and journalist, H. W. Nevinson.A. S. Byatt has described Evelyn Sharp as 'perspicacious, witty and a very good writer.' Evelyn Sharp and her autobiography deserve to be better knownFaber Finds is very pleased to be reissuing An Unfinished Adventure at the same time as the Manchester University Press publish Angela John's biography, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955

In the foreword to the first edition Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote:'In a sense, the story of Calcutta is the story of India . . . It is the story of how and why Empire was created and what happened when Empire finished . . . The imperial residue of Calcutta, a generation after Empire ended, is both a monstrous and a marvellous city. Journalism and television have given us a rough idea of the monstrosities but none at all of the marvels. I can only hope to define the first more clearly and to persuade anyone interested that the second is to be found there too'. Geoffrey Moorhouse succeeds triumphantly in his aims. First published in 1971 this title has stood the test of time. Remarkably it was the first full-length study of Calcutta, seat of the British Raj, since 1918.'The book is organized out of a profound understanding of the true issues and is brilliantly executed.' Paul Scott, Guardian

'The first serious attempt to analyse pop culture by someone who was part of it.' Julian Mitchell, GuardianThe redoubtable George Melly (1926-2007): flamboyant jazz singer, sexually ambiguous raconteur, prodigiously gifted critic. In the early sixties, at the birth of what we now recognise as the pop revolution, Melly began work as a broadsheet journalist, commenting upon this new cultural phenomenon. Revolt into Style (1970) is his first-hand account of those turbulent and exciting years when all things creative - whether music, fashion, film, art or literature - were changed utterly.Central to the book are The Beatles - the epitome of the swinging sixties - who charted the decade's changes and about whose significance the Liverpudlian Melly had a special feel and insight. Alongside the Fab Four is a large cast of movers and shakers, of wannabes and taste-makers, all dissected by Melly's surgical mind.

Gustav Holst was a leading figure in the new age of English music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most celebrated work, The Planets, is an orchestral tour de force, but he wrote music of startling originality in many forms, drawing inspiration from sources as varied as English folksong, oriental melody, the Apocrypha and Sanskrit literature, as well as from writers such as Keats, Hardy, Bridges and Whitman.This biography, by his daughter Imogen, was first published by Faber in 1938 and revised in 1969. In it she quotes at length from his many letters to his friends - especially to his closest colleague Vaughan Williams - and draws on her personal memories of Holst's later years.Holst struggled all his life against bouts of ill-health and depression, but his remarkable and good-humoured resilience enabled him to compose great music in often difficult circumstances. He was essentially a very private person, and the huge popular success of The Planets in 1919 disconcerted him. Imogen Holst describes the effect of this sudden fame on her father, and records the late flowering of his music in the final years of his life.

'Feinstein's triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena's predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful ... [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.' Guardian Lena's seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

First published in 1978 The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney is a moving and extraordinary account of a tragic genius penned by the composer Michael Hurd. Born in Gloucester in 1890 Ivor Gurney began writing songs and poems in his teens, taking his inspiration from the Severn Valley countryside where he grew up. Sent to the Western Front during the First World War Gurney experienced desolation and horror that made a profound impression on him. He ended his days in an asylum, but at his death in 1937 he was beginning to be acknowledged as one of England's finest composers. Still, it took several more decades for his work as a war poet to be fully appreciated.'Hurd compresses into a taut, sympathetic outline the initial optimism and later torment of Gurney's ill-starred life... distinguished by its crisp use of poetic extracts.' PN Review

Re-issued to coincide with the centenary of Messiaen's birth, The Messiaen Companion was the first major study to appear after the composer's death in April 1992. It was the first book to offer both a complete survey of Messiaen's extraordinary achievements and a comprehensive guide to his music, also examining in detail the enduring inspiration which Messiaen derived from his religious faith and from his lifelong passion for ornithology and the natural world. The contributors, all of whom have made a special study of the composer, include two biographers of Messiaen and a number of the foremost interpreters of his music. Messiaen's influential teaching is recalled in essays by three of his pupils (Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, and Peter Hill), and the composer is also remembered in a remarkable and moving contribution from his widow and devoted musical companion, the pianist Yvonne Loriod.

The Leopard and the Cliff has been out of print for a long time with second-hand copies being elusive; nonetheless it has a grim resonance with today demonstrating the futility of fighting in that part of the world.'Wallace Breem is a writer who never disappoints one. He has an extraordinary power of treating military disaster in depth and yet with pace, whether on the frontiers of Rome or British India, and of analysing the tensions of command. Gripping as an action story, deeply moving on the individual level, it involves one as an eye-witness from beginning to end.' Mary Renault'I found the book gripping. I am not a Frontier man but the account of the tribal situation on the Frontier and of the atmosphere accords with all I have read or heard about it. The author brings out movingly and with skill several points of vital importance to an understanding of British India and the Frontier in particular. Everything depended on India (in this case Pathan) co-operation; this broke down once the British showed lack of confidence and began to retire. The clash of loyalties which then arose was highly dramatic and painful for those involved. The loneliness of such a man as Sandeman is also brought out with skill.' Philip Mason, author of A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men

The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War was published in 1938. It is G. L. Steer's masterpiece. Martha Gellhorn famously wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt:'You must read a book by a man names Steer: it is called The Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques - he's the London Times man - and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I have tried to say to you the times I saw you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still deal with war. Pleas get it.'As Paul Preston says in his We Saw Spain Die, 'Martha Gellhorn's judgement has more than stood the test of time.' In his introduction, Nick Rankin writes.' The Tree of Gernika tells how Euzkadi, the democratic republic that the Basques created in their green homeland by the Bay of Biscay, fought for freedom and decency in an atrocious civil war. After a year of struggle, blockaded by sea, bombed from the air, fighting against overwhelming odds in their own hill, the Basques in the end lost to Franco's forces - but they lost honourably, without resorting to murder, torture and treachery.' It was Steer who alerted the world to the destruction of Gernika (Basque spelling), Guernica (Spanish spelling). It was the most important dispatch of his life, run by both The Times and The New York Times. Nick Rankin rightly describes The Tree of Gernika as 'a masterpiece of narrative history and eyewitness reporting by someone close to the key events . . .'

Hoping It Might Be So brings together all of Kit Wright's previous collections for adults as well as three dozen new poems. The collection, first published in 2000, was described by Christina Patterson in the Sunday Times as 'funny and profoundly humane' and by Sophie Hannah in the PN Review as 'full of verve and energy, with a strong musical quality that makes you want to read on and hear more'. Sean O'Brien in the Times Literary Supplement described Kit Wright as 'a masterly yet modest poet' while Ruth Padel in the Independent on Sunday said that 'all through his work there is that poignancy, darkness, brush with despair, which marks great comic work.' The poet Anthony Wilson said that Wright 'can be funny, serious and moving, and sometimes all three in the space of a single poem'.Hoping It Might Be So is a rewarding collection from an interesting, prolific and lively poet whose poems range from ribald to grief-stricken, elegiac to rambunctious

Eric Sams' study of Schumann's 246 songs (Faber 1961, revised 1993) - a companion volume to his The Songs of Hugo Wolf, also available in Faber Finds - remains a classic text. By providing a translation, commentary and notes for each of the songs, tracing original sources and relating recurring themes vividly to Schumann's life, Sams provides a unique documentary of Schumann's song-writing art.The book includes a foreword (to the First Edition) by the legendary accompanist, Gerald Moore,who writes:'So felicitous is the writing that one is hardly conscious of the erudition and profound thought that have gone into the making of it . . . Eric Sams has produced a work that will be read and read again as long as Robert Schumann's songs are loved.'

Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables is Lawrence D. Hills's ground-breaking book on all aspects of fruit and vegetable growing. It was widely praised on its publication and remains a classic text in the world of organic gardening.'Its great merit is that one feels that every operation described has been personally carried out by the author and selected as the most satisfactory after due consideration of traditional methods. The treatment of each plant is described from start to finish with sense, relish and humour; there are many fascinating analyses of vitamin and mineral contents and nutritional values, of different vegetables and fruits; and there is excellent advice on picking, harvesting, as well as on cooking ... it is the best practical guide to the subject that has appeared for years, and the author is not concerned with argument or philosophy, only with growing produce well.' Country Life'There is no better guide to non-chemical gardening than Lawrence D. Hills ... He is exceptionally well read and a good practical gardener into the bargain, not a very common combination, and no doubt because of his wide-ranging knowledge he is more balanced in his views than some advocates of all-organic gardening ... Where I find Mr Hills most stimulating is in his highly personal approach to fruit and vegetable varieties and his recommendations based on such commercially unfashionable criteria as flavour and food value. There is a wealth of information here which would be difficult to find in any other single book.' A. G. L. Hellyer in the Financial Times

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors, the Ancient Sumerians.On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people. 'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

This novel was first published by Faber in August 1940 under the title, The Loss of Eden. It was then reissued by the British Publishers Guild (a wartime cooperative venture), in March 1941, with the more arresting and overt title, If Hitler Comes: A Cautionary Tale. It was a work of speculative fiction with a moral purpose. It was a counterblast to the waverers, to those of a defeatist mien who could convince themselves an arrangement between Great Britain and Nazi Germany wouldn't be such a bad thing after all. The original Faber book description asks, 'What would it be like in England, if, after a premature peace on plausibly equal terms, we found that this ''peace'' had merely delivered us completely into Hitler's hands?' It continues, 'The imaginary New Zealand journalist, writing retrospectively as an eye-witness from the security of the Antipodes, tell us what happened - or rather what might have happened. And so precise and logical does he make the narrative, so real the characters, so vivid the scenes, that in reading we are almost persuaded that it did happen. Then we say: ''Nothing could be worse than that!''In their foreword and dedication, the authors, Douglas Brown and Christopher Serpell, write:'This is no fanciful picture. It is painted from life, with England as the background instead of Bohemia or Poland or any other country now under the Nazi heel. It is not intended to cause despondency or alarm, but to confirm and justify that resolution with which we are now fighting.If such a tale is to have a dedication it can only be to:THOSE WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN''It is a work of fiction, but the authors write so convincingly and have so keenly observed recent events and the men who have helped to fashion them that their narrative reads like a true historical picture of England with Hitler and the Nazis in control. This remarkable book should be widely read, not merely as an awful warning, but also because it is so movingly and skilfully written.' Education 'The events it describes are so appallingly life-like that I found it difficult to remember that I was only reading a 'novel' . . . If the Ministry of Information want to attack defeatism, they should distribute free copies throughout Whitehall and the country houses of England.' New Statesman and Nation

In his preface to the 1998 reissue, Michael Foot wrote, 'Guilty Men was conceived by three London journalists who had formed the habit of meeting on the roof of the Evening Standard offices in Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, just after the the afternoon paper had been put to bed and, maybe, just before the Two Brewers opened across the road.'The book's genesis and publication could hardly have been swifter. Its writing took four days from the 1st to the 4th June 1940: it was published on the 5th July. It is an angry book, indeed, a devastatingly effective polemic. Its target was the appeasers of the 1930s, the leading culprits being Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax who had left the country so ill-prepared, and who, by their pusillanimity, had emboldened Hitler and Mussolini; and in the case of the last two still favoured some accommodation with the fascist dictators. In today's parlance, it would be called a wake-up call. It was very successful selling about 200,000 copies. Kenneth Morgan, Michael Foot's biographer, describes the book as consisting of 'a series of brief vignettes of key episodes or personalities, the latter invariably foolish or dishonest.' Michael Foot wrote eight of the chapters, the first and most powerful one being on Dunkirk. Although Michael Foot was the main contributor, and the one who suggested 'Cato' as the umbrella pseudonym, the other two, as Michael Foot would be the first to admit, Peter Howard and Frank Own should not be forgotten. Seventy years on, Guilty Men has not lost its readability and power to enrage.

'The Gardeners of Salonika' as Clemenceau contemptuously labelled them, could well be called the forgotten army of the First World War. Yet the Macedonian Campaign was, in Lord Hankey's words, 'the most controversial of all the so-called sideshows.' In his definitive The First World War (1999) Sir John Keegan hailed Alan Palmer for having written 'the best study of the Macedonian Front in English.' Palmer tells the story of this extraordinary polyglot army (it included, at various times, contingents from seven countries) from the first landing at Salonika in 1915 to the peace in 1918. He also illuminates the political and strategic background: the ceaseless argument in London and Paris over the army's future and the maze of Greek politics within which it and its commanders were enclosed. 'A masterly and colourful account of this, the most controversial and neglected sideshow of them all.'Guardian'Not only a valuable contribution to history, but also an enthralling book' Sunday Times

With a foreword by the legendary accompanist, Gerald Moore, Eric Sams' study (Faber 1961, revised 1983) is a notable landmark in the establishment of Wolf as one of the supreme masters of German song. Comprehensively revised and enlarged in 1983, the main subject matter remains the 242 published songs that Wolf wrote for voice and piano, though the Ibsen songs for voice and orchestra are also discussed.English translations are provided and the backgrounds to the original poems by Morike, Eichendorff and Goethe, as well as the Italian and Spanish sources from which the songbooks were drawn, are fully explored. Each song is dated, its keys identified and vocal range determined.'This is the most important book in the English language on the songs of Hugo Wolf since Ernest Newman proclaimed the composer's genius in 1907 . . . To the English-speaking student this work is a treasure to which he will find himself returning again and again: it is indispensable to those of us anxious to gain a deeper knowledge of Wolf.' Gerald Moore

Comfrey is noted by both organic gardeners and herbalists for its great usefulness and versatility. Of particular interest is the 'Bocking 14' cultivar of Russian Comfrey. This strain was developed during the 1950s by Lawrence D. Hills, who founded the organic gardening organization now known as Garden Organic.Lawrence D. Hills was the world authority on comfrey. In this book, he wrote for farmers and gardeners in all countries, showing how this useful plant could be cultivated in both tropical and temperate zones to produce a crop equally rewarding for gardener, smallholder and mechanized farmer. Subtitled 'Past, Present and Future,' on its publication in 1976, this was the most comprehensive survey of the properties and cultivation of comfrey ever, and Comfrey remains undoubtedly the essential book on the subject, as well as a lasting testament to Lawrence D. Hills's indefatigable efforts to achieve a better understanding of it.

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 unambiguous pronouncements as 'Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.'; and that he asked for his friends to burn his letters at his death, but, against that, Auden himself often reviewed literary biographies and normally with enthusiasm. Moreover he argued for biographies of writers such as Dryden, Trollope, Wagner and Gerard Manley Hopkins as their lives would tell us something about their art.Humphrey Carpenter himself nicely summarizes Auden's ambiguity on this question. 'Here (referring to literary biography), as so often in his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted.'Although the biography was not authorized it did receive the co-operation of the Auden Estate which gave permission for letters and unpublished works to be quoted. The result is a biography that was widely praised on first publication in 1981 and which continues to hold its own. Now is the obvious time to reissue it with the character of Humphrey Carpenter playing an important role in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. In his introduction Alan Bennett writes 'When I started writing the play I made much use of the biographies of both Auden and Britten written by Humphrey Carpenter and both are models of their kind. Indeed I was consulting his books so much that eventually Carpenter found his way into the play.' 'Carpenter is a model biographer - diligent, unspeculative, sympathetic, and extremely good at finding out what happened when and with whom . . . admirably detailed and researched study.' John Bayley, The Listener'an illuminating book; full of information, unobtrusively affectionate, it describes with unpretentious elegance the curve of a great poet's life and work' Frank Kermode, Guardian'sharpens and usually lights up even the most canvassed parts of the Auden life and myth . . . a deeply interesting book about a deeply interesting life' Roy Fuller, Sunday Times' . . . the story of a remarkable man told by one of the best living biographers' David Cecil, Book Choice

'Angus Wilson is one of the most enjoyable novelists of the 20th century... Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) analyses a wide range of British society in a complicated plot that offers all the pleasures of detective fiction combined with a steady and humane insight.' Margaret DrabbleFirst published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes draws upon perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history: the 'Piltdown Man', finally exposed in 1953. The novel's protagonist is Gerald Middleton, professor of early medieval history and taciturn creature of habit. Separated from his Swedish wife, Gerald is increasingly conscious of his failings. Moreover, some years ago he was involved in an excavation that led to the discovery of a grotesque idol in the tomb of Bishop Eorpwald. The sole survivor of the original excavation party, Gerald harbours a potentially ruinous secret...

Michael Foot's two-volume biography of Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britain's greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume II, first published in 1973, begins with Bevan's role in the founding of a comprehensive National Health Service - this while he was also tasked with addressing the country's severe post-war housing shortage. It takes in his 1951 resignation from the cabinet in protest at the introduction of prescription charges, and his subsequent leadership of a 'Bevanite' Labour left; his publication in 1952 of In Place of Fear; his service as Shadow Foreign Secretary during the Suez crisis in 1956; his controversial reversal of opposition to nuclear weapons in 1957; and his death from cancer in 1960.

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 with the aim of researching the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. One of its best-loved publications is The Pub and the People (1943), a unique study of one of Britain's best-loved pastimes, describing how people behaved in pubs, what and how much they drank, and the decor and layout of the average pre-war alehouse. Alongside sociological interest it offers amusing insights into an era when supping pints was only for the roughest customers, and beer was considered helpful not only to general health ('There is no bad ale, so Grandma said') but also (contra the porter in Macbeth) to the act of love. 'The authors of this book have unearthed much curious information.' George Orwell, Listener'Anyone with an interest in the history of beer and pubs in Britain ought to read it.' Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog

Michael Foot's two-volume biography of Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britain's greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service, - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume I, first published in 1962, describes Bevan's life from his birth in Tredegar in the South Wales Valleys, through his abortive schooling, his employment at a colliery and the subsequent embrace of socialism that would make him a leader among South Wales miners. It follows his path to the House of Commons as a Labour MP with a fast-rising reputation as a defender of the working class; and his marriage in 1934 to fellow firebrand MP Jennie Lee. The volume closes with Labour's landslide election victory of 1945, and Bevan's appointment as Minister of Health.

'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.'So begins F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author's inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens' one 'completely serious work of art'; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting.'[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read... the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality.'Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond - Jack to his family, John in later life - was born in Birkenhead in 1902 and made his living as an advertising copywriter, but his true writing life was in poetry, three volumes of which he published in his lifetime: The Walls of Glass (1934), Voices in a Giant City (1947), and Selection (1958). Tessimond died in May 1962, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday, and it would fall to Hubert Nicholson, his friend and executor, to make a posthumous selection of his work including a number of uncollected and unpublished poems. Not Love Perhaps (1978) has at its heart the memorable title piece which contrasts the idea of romantic love 'that many waters cannot quench' with the notion of a mutual companionship that enables two people to 'walk more firmly through dark narrow places'.