UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY · HISTORY AND CRITICISM
Peter Quennell
Also known as: Peter QUENNELL, Peter Courtney Quennell
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell CBE (9 March 1905 – 27 October 1993) was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic. He wrote extensively on social history. Born in Bickley, Kent, the son of architect (and author/illustrator) C. H. B. Quennell and Marjorie Quennell (historian/author/illustrator), he was educated at Berkhamsted Grammar School and at Balliol College, Oxford. While still at school some of his poems were selected by Richard Hughes for the anthology Public School Verse, which brought him to the attention of writers such as Edith Sitwell. In 1922 he published his first book, Masques and Poems. This was followed by many other volumes, particularly his Four Portraits of 1945 (studies of Boswell, Gibbon, Sterne, and Wilkes), books on London and works on Baudelaire, Byron, Pope, Ruskin , Hogarth, Shakespeare, Proust and Samuel Johnson. He first practised journalism in London. In 1930 he taught at the University of Tokyo. In 1944–51, he was editor of The Cornhill Magazine and from 1951 to 1979 founder-editor of History Today. Quennell published two volumes of autobiography, The Marble Foot and Wanton Chase. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and was knighted in the 1992 New Year Honours. He married five times, and had two children, a daughter (Sarah) from his third marriage and a son (Alexander) from his fifth. He died in London. --adapted from Wikipedia
Shakespeare's life began near the reflecting, gleaming river Avon, which today flows past Stratford's Church of the Holy Trinity where he lies buried, and past a theatre where his dramas are seen and heard by visitors from all nations.
— from Shakespeare, 1977
Most acclaimed
A history of English literature
Augustan literature (sometimes referred to misleadingly as Georgian literature) is a style of British literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively. It was a literary epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. In philosophy, it was an age increasingly dominated by empiricism, while in the writings of political economy, it marked the evolution of mercantilism as a formal philosophy, the development of capitalism and the triumph of trade. The chronological boundary points of the era are generally vague, largely since the label's origin in contemporary 18th-century criticism has made it a shorthand designation for a somewhat nebulous age of satire. Samuel Johnson, whose famous A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, is also "to some extent" associated with the Augustan period.
Shakespeare
1977
Shakespeare has been the lodestar of English literature, not only to our finest biographers & critics but to our greatest imaginative writers as well. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain & James Joyce have all written of the man— as enigma, ancestor or phantom. In Shakespeare Burgess, whose Nothing Like the Sun Harold Bloom called "the only successful novel ever written about Shakespeare," takes up that daunting challenge once again, reimagining the actual world of Shakespeare the author, actor & man. Burgess is mindful of the few facts we have about Shakespeare & handles them with great dexterity. But this isn't a mere recounting of facts. It's an attempt by one virtuoso writer to capture the likeness of the supreme virtuoso, to locate him exactly & take his measure. It's also an attempt to present him —as only a gifted professional writer can —as a working writer among others, a man of his time in his own milieu. Shakespeare the Elizabethan upstart? Literary genius without peer? The representative man? The actor among actors, businessman among businessmen? What Burgess so skillfully gets across —alongside what he calls "the main facts about the life & society from which the poems & plays arose"— is a genuine feel for who Shakespeare was & where he was. In the end, Burgess claims for himself the right of every Shakespeare-lover: "to paint his own portrait of the man."