We are living in a very difficult time. The United States is greatly polarized. Important institutions are failing. People have lost confidence in the government. The country is in decline.What are the indications of decline? How did we get here? Which divisions are most harmful to the country? Can these trends be reversed? Can the divisions he healed? What can we do about it?In this book James F. Booth answers these questions and many more.

A revelatory, intimate, and sympathetic study of Philip Larkin, an iconic poet and a much misunderstood man, offering fresh understanding of the interplay of his life and work.Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at ...

What is it to do justice to the absent victims of past injustice, given the distance that separates us from them? Grounded in political theory and guided by the literature on historical justice, W. James Booth restores the dead to their central place at the heart of our understanding of why and how to deal with past injustice. Testimonies and accounts from the race war in the United States, the Holocaust, post-apartheid South Africa, Argentina’s Dirty War and the conflict in Northern Irela...

_______________'Superb … Booth's psychology is subtler than Motion's and more convincing' - Peter J. Conradi, Spectator'Booth's diligence is unquestionable and even readers who think they know the poems will see nuances they had previously missed … should render further attention by biographers superfluous for several years' - Guardian'Those of us who never warmed to Larkin the man or poet,...

A six-part BBC Radio 4 crime drama set in nineteenth-century LondonIt is 1830, a year after Sir Robert Peel’s creation of the Metropolitan Police, known as the 'Peelers'. As the brand new bobbies patrol the beat in their smart blue uniforms, armed only with truncheons and rattles, they form the first line of defence against crime.But as this thrilling series opens, the fledgling detective force is proving unpopular, sparking deep political unrest and public...

Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, settingrecent f...

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again.A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new li...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...

The book offers a detailed commentary on the poetry of Philip Larkin, exploring the political and cultural contexts which have shaped his contemporary reputation. Part 1, Life and Times, traces Larkin's early years and follows his development, within his career as a university librarian, into one of the most important and popular voices in twentieth-century poetry. Part 2, Artistic Strategies, explores a range of methodologies and aesthetic influences by which Larkin was able to create poe...

The literary critic examines the love lives and career ambitions of some of the twentieth century's greatest female authors—from Sylvia Plath to Anaïs Nin.Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) want to marry Ezra Pound when she was far more attracted to women? Why did Simone de Beauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre?In Between the Sheets, author and feminist scholar Le...

Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels - challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligent - remain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. The highly successful Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public ...

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.