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Neil Powell

The poet George Crabbe (1754 - 1832), best known as the author of Peter Grimes and The Village, was also a surgeon, a clergyman, a botanist, and a novelist. An ambitious, resourceful, self-made professional man, he devoted his middle years to his children and his increasingly ill wife, after whose death he embarked, at 60, on an astonishing second life. 
 
This new biography charts, for the first time, Crabbe's progress from an impoverished, provincial childhood in coastal Suffolk to late eighteenth-century London, where he witnessed the Gordon Riots and acquired Edmund Burke as patron; through his eventful career as a ducal chaplain and county parson whose addictions included natural history, theatre-going, and opium; and so on to his final years when, as a rector in Wiltshire, he travelled widely, met major literary figures such as Scott and Wordsworth, and fell in love with some remarkable young women. 
 
Neil Powell provides a compelling portrait of a uniquely gifted poet - a man of low-key and unsentimental vision who lived a quintessentially English life.

George Crabbe

An English Life

Valerie Grove

Frank and funny, unorthodox, liberated and quintessentially English, Dodie Smith, playwright and novelist, was the author of those immortal classics, The Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle. One of the most successful dramatists of her generation, she spent the war years in America, befriended Christopher Isherwood and, through Walt Disney's film, became a household name.

Dear Dodie

The Life of Dodie Smith

Angelica Garnett

Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her Aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. 
 
Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes, David Garnett (whom she later married), and many others. 
 
But Deceived with Kindness is also a record of a young girl's particular struggle to achieve independence from that extraordinary and intense milieu as a mature and independent woman. With an honesty that is by degrees agonising and uplifting, the author creates a vibrant, poignant picture of her mother, Vanessa Bell, of her own emergent individuality, and of the Bloomsbury era.

Deceived With Kindness

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell, artist, sister of Virginia Woolf, wife of Clive Bell and lover of Duncan Grant, is one of the most fascinating and modern figures of the Bloomsbury set, but unlike most of them she rarely put pen to writing paper. When she did, she was witty and illuminating about their early lives. The eldest of the Stephen family, she grew up with Virginia in Victorian gloom at Hyde Park Gate and later blossomed in bohemian style in Bloomsbury. From the twenties to the forties she lived and painted at Charleston Farmhouse like a heroine of the sixties and seventies, at the centre of a colourful world of family, friends, artists and intellectuals. Sketches in Pen and Ink is a unique collection of largely unpublished memoirs - most of them written to be read at meetings of the Memoir club, in which Vanessa writes with wit and charm about herself, her childhood, her remarkable family and friends, her moving relationship with Roger Fry, and her art. Her daughter, Angelica Garnett, has written a vivid and personal introduction which adds considerably to our understanding of this extraordinary woman and artist.

Sketches In Pen And Ink

A Bloomsbury Notebook

Harry Ricketts

The stories of Rudyard Kipling are read all over the world, by people of all ages, yet no biography has fully explored the complex link between his fascinating life and his writing; untill this one. Harry Ricketts brings Kipling vividly and touchingly to life - his traumatic childhood, split between India and England (haunting the powerful Jungle Books); his youth as a reporter in India, troubled by love and politics; his entry into London literary life and his often hilarious travels in America. Ricketts explores Kiplings's imperialism and radicaism, and traces his increasing reclusiveness after his son's death in the First World War. The dramatic life is backed by subtle readings of the works , from the BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS to KIM and STALKY AND CO. With its strong narrative drive, this biography entrals and moves, while shining a strong new light on a great writer.

The Unforgiving Minute

A Life of Rudyard Kipling

Hugh Brogan

For a man who longed for a quiet existence, Arthur Ransome led a remarkably adventurous life. His bohemian years as a writer in Chelsea before the First World War closed with the agony of his prosecution for Libel by Lord Alfred Douglas. His two marriages - first to an unstable fantasist and later to a formidable Russian who had been Trotsky's secretary - were, to say the least, stormy. As a journalist he had a ringside view of the Russian Revolution and travelled widely in the Middle East and China. It was not until he was 45 and settled in the Lake District that he embarked, in the Swallows and Amazons stories, on some of the best loved books ever written for children.

The Life Of Arthur Ransome

Hilaire Belloc

Here is the distinctly surreal world of Henry King, who perished through his 'chief defect' of chewing little bits of string; of dishonest Matilda whose dreadful lies led her to death by burning; and of Godolphin Horne who 'held the human race in scorn' and ended as the boy 'who blacks the boots at the Savoy'. 
 
Here too are the beautiful lyrics of longing and loss; the sonnets and epigrams; the hugely enjoyable Bad Child's Book of Beasts - not to mention More Beasts for Worse Children; and The Modern Traveller, one of the finest satirical poems in English. 
 
Complete Verse reveals all of Hilaire Belloc's dazzling range and makes plain why he is one of the most truly popular poets of modern times.

Complete Verse

Michael Holroyd

Lytton Strachey, genius, wit, iconoclast, biographer, pacifist, and homosexual campaigner, was at the nexus of the literary and artistic life of Bloomsbury. In the 1960s he was seen as a progenitor of the hippy cult. Now he appears as a far more subversive and challenging figure. He revolutionised the writing of biography and smuggled deviant sexual behaviour into our history in his reassessment of Elizabethan and Victorian times. For this re-telling of his story Holroyd has had access to published and unpublished material unavailable in the 1960s when his biography of Strachey first appeared. In many of Bloomsbury's three-cornered relationships, he had only two sides of the triangle. Now he has all three, and in a new social and political climate can tell the full story of this extraordinary world with candour, sympathy and sexual explicitness. He has cut 100, 000 words, revised much of the text and added a wealth of new material, about Strachey himself, about Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Rupert Brooke and most vividly about the tragic life of Strachey's companion Dora Carrington.

Lytton Strachey

The New Biography

James Wood

In a series of long essays, James Wood examines the connection between literature and religious belief, in a startlingly wide group of writers. Wood re-appraises the writing of such figures as Thomas More, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Anton Chekhov, Thomas Mann, Nikolai Gogol, Gustave Flaubert and Virginia Woolf, vigorously reading them against the grain of received opinion, and illuminatingly relating them to questions of religious and phiosophical belief. 
 
Contemporary writers, such as Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon and George Steiner, are also discussed, with the boldness and attention to language that have made Wood such an influential and controversial figure. Writing here about his own childhood struggle to believe, Wood says that 'the child of evangelism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference'. Wood brings that suspicion to bear on literature itself. The result is a unique book of criticism.

The Broken Estate

Essays on Literature and Belief

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing is to be found in this collection of five unpublished pieces. Despite Quentin Bell's comprehensive biography and numerous recent studies of her, the author's own account of her early life holds new fascination - for its unexpected detail, the strength of its emotion, and its clear-sighted judgement of Victorian values. 
 
In 'Reminiscences' Virginia Woolf focuses on the death of her mother, 'the greatest disaster that could happen', and its effect on her father, the demanding patriarch who took a high toll of the women in his household. She surveys some of the same ground in 'A Sketch of the Past', the most important memoir in this collection, which she wrote with greater detachment and supreme command of her art shortly before her death. 
 
Readers will be struck by the extent to which she drew on these early experiences for her novels, as she tells how she exorcised the obsessive presence of her mother by writing To the Lighthouse. The last three papers were composed to be read to the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, which exacted absolute candour of its members. Virginia Woolf's contributions were not only bold but also original and amusing. She describes George Duckworth's passionate efforts to launch the Stephen girls; gives her own version of 'Old Bloomsbury'; and, with wit and some malice, reflects on her connections with titled society.

Moments Of Being

Henrietta Garnett

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the author of Vanity Fair and step-aunt of Virginia Woolf, was also a fine writer. Based on new and original research, this enchanting and evocative memoir paints the world of Anny's intricate web of relations and friends: children's parties with the Dickens family, holidays with Julia Margaret Cameron and the Tennysons, intimate scenes with Browning in Rome and Ruskin on Lake Coniston. 
 
In addition we read about Anny's own inner life: her near-obsession with her father: William Makepeace Thackeray, her escape into writing, her startling marriage to her second cousin and her godson, and the story of her sister Minny's passionate marriage to Leslie Stephen. We also learn of Stephen's second wife, Julia Jackson, mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. 
 
Meticulously researched, this intimate story draws not only on a wealth of letters, journals, hitherto unpublished sketches and photographs, but also on family legends passed down to the author through four generations. Illuminating, comic and touching, Anny reads like a novel, presenting a unique portrait of the rich literary world that formed the bridge between the Victorians and Bloomsbury.

Anny

A Life of Anny Thackeray Ritchie

Victoria Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother. But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field.

Trollope

Paul O'Keeffe

page in front of him, testify to his final, triumphant burst of creativity. for what precisely it would be remarkably difficult to say.'  Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorisation.He launched the only twentieth-century English avant garde movement, Vorticism, in 1914.  His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918.  During the intervening World War, as an artillery officer at the third battle of Ypres, he gained his 'political education under fire'.  Anti-war books of the 1930s argued against what he regarded as a war-mongering left-wing orthodoxy, and presented the case for the right.  This placed him in the position somewhere between an advocate of appeasement and what looked uncomfortably like a Nazi sympathizer.  Despite an admission, in 1939, that he had been wrong about Hitler, his reputation never recovered from the stigma of Fascism.After the Second World War, spent in penniless and bitter exile in Canada, he returned to London and, in the last decade of his life, received some measure of the success and recognition he had been denied for so long.  It coincided, tragically, with the realisation that he was going blind.  Visual expression denied him, he devoted all his remaining energies to writing.  Seven books in as many years, written in laborious longhand when he was unable to see the

Some Sort Of Genius

A Life of Wyndham Lewis

Stacy Schiff

A fascinating account of the life of one of the century's great eccentrics - the brilliant Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Born in 1900 of impoverished aristocracy, he swiftly developed a mania for aviation, despite his chaotic mind and total technological incompetence. He flew reconnaissance missions in the War and wrote some strange and wonderful books, including the classic children's story THE LITTLE PRINCE, between theatrically executed airplane crashed. He died in the air in 1944, and his brief life instantly acquired mythical status. 'Every facet of Saint-Exupery's short and dramatic life is covered in this fascinating biography. This is Stacy Schiff's first book, but she writes with all the skill, assurance and mastery of an old literary hand. If there was such a thing as a prize for a first biography, I would nominate this book. ' Frank McLynn, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.

Saint-Exupery

A Biography

Norman Sherry

Unquestionably one of the greatest novelists of his time, Graham Greene had always guarded his privacy, remaining aloof, mysterious and unpredictable.  Nonetheless, he took the surprising step of allowing Norman Sherry complete access to letter and diaries, and gave his consent to this full and frank biography in three volumes - the first of which takes Greene's life up to the beginning of the Second World War when he published some of his most remarkable work, including Journey Without Maps (1935), England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), Brighton Rock (1938) and The Confidential Agent (1939). At the heart of the story lies a remarkable series of letters Greene wrote to his wife, Vivien, for whose sake he became a Catholic.  They show us an unknown, younger Greene, impassioned and romantic.  Sherry also recounts in fascinating detail how Greene struggled to turn himself into a novelist and learn his craft, and follows his subject's pre-war footsteps to West Africa and Mexico, where he was able to penetrate far into the strange and alarming territory that Greene has made his own.  The book that emerges is without doubt one of the most revealing literary biographies of the decade.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume 1

1904-1939

Michael Wood

In this absorbing series of essays Michael Wood probes and plays with the dilemmas of twentieth century fiction - the myth of lost paradise, lost certainties, the suspension between contrary ideals, the lure of fantasy, the quest for the silence beneath speech. Wood's net is cast wide, from fables to novels, and he takes due account of personal and political context and of wider cultural and critical currents, noting fiction's swerving resistance to `history'. A superb essay on Roland Barthes is juxtaposed with a dissection of Beckett's prose comedy; an investigation of three Cuban writers -Cortazar, Cabrera Infante and Arenas - is followed by illuminating essays on Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino. In the second half of the book, the exploration of time, form and fantasy, and of the break with modernism, continues in studies of Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster and Jeanette Winterson. Rich with pleasures, spiked with insights, provocative and satisfying, this is one of the most exciting explorations of contemporary literature in recent years.

Children Of Silence

Studies in Contemporary Fiction

Jeremy Lewis

`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed the litarary world of its social smartness and any worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review. Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romatic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, abd his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.

Cyril Connolly

A Life

Quentin Bell

As the nephew of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell enjoyed an initimacy with his subject granted to few biographers. Originally published in two volumes in 1972, his acclaimed biography describes Virginia Woolf's family and childhood; her earliest writings; the formation of the Bloomsbury Group; her marriage to Leonard Woolf; the mental breakdown of the years 1912-15; the origins and growth of the Hogarth Press; her friendships with T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and Vita Sackvill-West; her struggles to write The Waves and The Years; and the political and personal distresses of her last decade. 
 
Compelling, moving and entertaining, Quentin Bell's biography was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. It is a fitting tribute to a remarkable and complex woman, one of the greatest writers of the century.

Samuel Hynes

The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.

Edwardian Turn Of Mind

Robert Crawford

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves and struggles of the great poet. 
 
With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible élan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive, intelligent biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compels the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

The Bard

William Graves

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war. 
 
Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years. 
 
Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his 'Muses', and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

Wild Olives

Life in Majorca With Robert Graves

Jon Stallworthy

Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today – this is the comprehensive literary biography of the greatest WW1 poet 
 
Wilfred Owen tragically died in battle just a few days before the Armistice. Now, during the centenary year of his death, this biography honours Owen’s brief yet remarkable life, and the enduring legacy he left. Stallworthy covers his life from the childhood spent in the backstreets of Shrewsbury to the appalling final months in the trenches. More than a simple account of his life, it is also a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind. 
This revised edition contains the beautiful illustrations of the original edition, including the drawings by Owen and facsimile manuscripts of his greatest poems, as well as a new preface by the author. 
 
‘One of the finest biographies of our time.’ Graham Greene 
 
‘An outstanding book, a worthy memorial to its subject.’ Kingsley Amis 
 
‘As lovingly detailed as the records of Owen's short life permit, but it is always fascinatingly readable, in fact engrossing.’ Sunday Telegraph

Wilfred Owen

A.N. Wilson

'I have read all W. Scott's novels at least fifty times,' wrote Byron. '...grand work. Scotch Fielding, as well as great English poet - wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.' 
 
A. N. Wilson's subtle, entertaining and frequently provocative critical biography looks back through the indifference which has surrounded Walter Scott in recent times, and the distortions of his Victorian idolaters, to recapture the freshness of Scott as he appeared to his contemporaries. 
 
Despite his staggering output as a novelist, poet, biographer, historian and anthologist - not to mention his copious letters, and the celebrated Journal - Scott only embarked on his literary career in early middle age. In the face of constant ill-health, and financial and domestic troubles, he successfully combined the life of a bestselling, much-loved and enormously influential author with that of a lawyer, landowner, Border farmer, part-time soldier and paterfamilias. A. N. Wilson makes clear that Scott's genius, his humaneness, and his splendid qualities of stoicism and sympathy were as apparent in his life as in his work. 
 
By weaving together the life and the works, and discussing all Scott's best-known books as well as many which are less familiar, A. N. Wilson has produced a lively and contagiously enthusiastic reassessment of the writer who was, he believes, 'the greatest single imaginative genius of the nineteenth century'. Walter Scott's influence was felt not only in the field of literature, but also in the worlds of art, architecture, opera and domestic manners, and by figures as diverse as Byron and Queen Victoria, Dickens and Donizetti, Pugin and Victor Hugo. 
 
Winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize

A Life Of Walter Scott

The Laird of Abbotsford

A. N. Wilson's sympathetic, readable and brilliantly analytical narrative places John Milton, the greatest poet of the seventeenth century, in the context of his political and religious ideas.

The Life of John Milton

Norma Clarke

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.

The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Wilfred Owen when both were in hospital, on to the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the Great War began. 
 
Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. We follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry. 
 
We come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. We get a fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

Strange Meetings

The Lives of the Poets of the Great War

Katherine Frank

It is January 1719 and Daniel Defoe, almost sixty, sits at a table, writing. He is troubled with gout and debt, but for now is preoccupied with a younger man on a barren shore – Robinson Crusoe, for which he will principally be remembered. 
 
Several miles south, an old man, Robert Knox, is bent over a heavy volume. It is Historical Relation, his account of being held captive on Ceylon, published forty years ago after he escaped and returned to England. It has long been out of print, but a copy perhaps sits on the desk of Daniel Defoe as he writes. 
 
Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the intertwined lives of two real men – Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox – and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero, the story of Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and of Robert Knox, the man who was Crusoe.

Crusoe

Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox And The Creation Of A Myth

Literary Exors Of Q D Leavis

Fiction and the Reading Public provoked fierce controvers when first published in 1932, and it has since come to be recognised as a classic in its field. In her fascinating study, Q D Leavis investigates what has happened to the public taste in the last three centuries and what effect this has had on both the life of the nation and the equality of living for the individual. A brilliant piece of literary exegesis and an illuminating anthropological commentary - DAILY MAIL An illuminating study. . . it offers a rich store of interest, not only in its vigorous scrutiny of the novel and the influences which have shaped it, but also in its study of changing attitudes and tempos of life amont the general public who read novels. . . An achievement of distinguished quality and high value. New Republic. She has performed a noble office by inquiring into the case of the bestseller. The result is no less entertaining than instructive -SATURDAY REVIEW.

Fiction And The Reading Public

When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic. The common thread in Wood's latest collection of essays is what makes us laugh - and the book is an attempt to distinguish between the perhaps rather limited English comedy (as seen in Waugh, for example) and a 'continental' tragic-comedy, which he sees as real, universal and quixotic. 
 
A particularly acerbic, and very funny, essay - which has been widely celebrated - deals with Zadie Smith, Rushdie, Pynchon and DeLillo; its title, 'Hysterical Realism', has already entered the phrasebook of literary language. 
 
With its brilliant studies of Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Naipaul, Pritchett and Bellow, The Irresponsible Self offers more exhilarating despatches from one of our finest living critics.

The Irresponsible Self

On Laughter and the Novel

Isaiah Berlin

'I was exhausted at the end, &amp; yet I am sure that if ever I saw &amp; heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.' 
 
So wrote a listener to her friend after attending one of the lectures based on the book. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age is the text Berlin wrote for four of the lectures, delivered in 1952. He revised what he had written extensively afterwards but never published it. It is his longest work and also the only connected account he gave of his key insights into the history of the ideas that dominate the political arguments of our own time. 
 
As he put it in his Prologue, 'The age of which we speak was singularly rich in original conceptions; they transformed our world, and the words in which they were formulated speak to us still'.

Political Ideas In The Romantic Age

Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought

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