He argues that the best poetry that came out of the 1939-45 war, while very different from the work of Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, and their contemporaries, is in no sense inferior. It also has different matters to consider. War in the air, war at sea, war beyond Europe, the politics of Empire, democratic accountability - these are no subjects to be found in the poetry of the Great War. Nor is sex. Nor did American poets have much to say about that war, whereas the Americans Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, and Louis Simpson, are among the greatest English-speaking poets of World War Two. Both Hecht and Simpson write about the Holocaust and its aftermath, as do the English poets, Lotte Kramer and Gerda Mayer. For these reasons among others, Englishspeaking poetry of the Second World War deserves to be valued as work of unique importance.

John Lucas's riveting novel is about the role of memory in how we shape and come to terms with the past. Waterdrops is about what is lost, what endures, about, as one of the characters says, the terrible things that happen in war, and not only on the battlefield. It is also about love.

Greece has always had its admirers, though none seems to have cherished the Athenian tavernas, the murderous traffic and the jaded prostitutes, the petty bureaucratic tyrannies, the street noise and the heroic individualists with the irony and detachment of John Lucas. '92 Acharnon Street' is a gritty portrait of a dirty city and a wayward country. Yet Lucas' love for the realities of Greece triumphs- for the Homeric kindness of her people towards strangers, for the pleasures of her table and for the proximity of islands in clear blue water as a refuge from the noise and pollution of her capital city. This is Greece as the Greeks would recognise it, seen through the eyes of a poet.

This title discusses the sequence of four plays that begins with "Richard II" and concludes with "Henry V" referred to as the second tetralogy. This second tetralogy, with its complex characters, is evidence of Shakespeare's developing skills as a playwright and the influence events of the period had on his writing. The author explains what these influences were and how they may have affected Shakespeare's portrayal of the various characters.

First published in 1977, this book studies three important nineteenth-century novelists: Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and Thomas Hardy. They are all provincial novelists who wrote about social change and the attendant problems and pressures this brought with it. Unlike previous critics, who have tended to concentrate on her 'social-problem' novels, here the author treats Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers and Cousin Phillis as central texts. However a chapter also examines Gaskell and Engels perception of social change in Manchester. This book also seeks to correct Hale White's neglect, anointing Revolution in Tanner's Lane and Clara Hopgood major works. The survey of women in Hardy's novels represents an illuminating new angle and leads on to a discussion of love and marriage in later Victorian fiction.

The intention of this collection of essays, first published in 1971, is to explore the political aspects of some nineteenth century English writers. Under the influence of the great revolutionary upheavals of the period almost all its most important writers were involved, explicitly or otherwise, in political ideas. This is an exploratory volume, and will be of absorbing interest to anyone studying the interaction between literature and ideas in the nineteenth century.

Spanning the past 20 years, this collection encompasses the work of a leading modern poetry critic.

First published in 1966, this book collects six essays which discuss the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the work of several nineteenth century novelists. In the novels studied, and the discussion of fiction that follows, the authors argue that all these novelists' attempts to confront social change - to connect old with new, past with present and the attempted inclusiveness of vision in a changing society - sooner or later fail. The essays are polemic in arguing against the contemporary critical consensus that this failure is a limitation of imaginative intelligence rather than an endorsement of a receding past which the process of change was charged with destroying.

First published in 1980, this book surveys Dickens' growing power to drive deep into the causes of his contemporary conditions. It reveals the importance of nature to Dickens as a rich metaphor of human freedom and potentiality, and emphasises his concern with time and the problems of freedom. The author considers the peculiarity of Dickens being unanimously acclaimed as a great writer considering the difficulty in placing him definitively within the literary tradition. The author argues Dickens was an isolated figure, indifferent to changing fashions and with a strong sense of the dignity of human nature and that this formed the basis of his character and writings.

The collection of essays presented in this volume represents some of the best recent critical work on William Blake as poet, prophet, visual artist, and social and political critic of his time. The critical range that is represented includes examples of Marxist, New Historicist, Feminist and Psychoanalytical approaches to Blake. Taken together, the essays consider all areas and moments of Blake's career as poet, from the early lyrics to his later epic poems, and they have been chosen to reveal not only the range of Blake's concerns but also to alert the reader to the rich variety of contemporary criticism that is devoted to him. Although the majority of essays are devoted to Blake as poet, others consider his work as printmaker, illustrator, and visionary artist. However severely individual essays choose to judge him, ultimately all the contributions to this book affirm Blake as one of the great geniuses of English art and letters. William Blake provides a valuable introduction by one of Britain's foremost critics and will be welcomed by students wanting to familiarise themselves with the work of Blake.

First published in 1966, this book collects six essays which discuss the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the work of several nineteenth century novelists. In the novels studied, and the discussion of fiction that follows, the authors argue that all these novelists' attempts to confront social change - to connect old with new, past with present and the attempted inclusiveness of vision in a changing society - sooner or later fail. The essays are polemic in arguing against the contemporary critical consensus that this failure is a limitation of imaginative intelligence rather than an endorsement of a receding past which the process of change was charged with destroying.

First published in 1980, this book surveys Dickens' growing power to drive deep into the causes of his contemporary conditions. It reveals the importance of nature to Dickens as a rich metaphor of human freedom and potentiality, and emphasises his concern with time and the problems of freedom. The author considers the peculiarity of Dickens being unanimously acclaimed as a great writer considering the difficulty in placing him definitively within the literary tradition. The author argues Dickens was an isolated figure, indifferent to changing fashions and with a strong sense of the dignity of human nature and that this formed the basis of his character and writings.

First published in 1977, this book studies three important nineteenth-century novelists: Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and Thomas Hardy. They are all provincial novelists who wrote about social change and the attendant problems and pressures this brought with it. Unlike previous critics, who have tended to concentrate on her 'social-problem' novels, here the author treats Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers and Cousin Phillis as central texts. However a chapter also examines Gaskell and Engels perception of social change in Manchester. This book also seeks to correct Hale White's neglect, anointing Revolution in Tanner's Lane and Clara Hopgood major works. The survey of women in Hardy's novels represents an illuminating new angle and leads on to a discussion of love and marriage in later Victorian fiction.

The intention of this collection of essays, first published in 1971, is to explore the political aspects of some nineteenth century English writers. Under the influence of the great revolutionary upheavals of the period almost all its most important writers were involved, explicitly or otherwise, in political ideas. This is an exploratory volume, and will be of absorbing interest to anyone studying the interaction between literature and ideas in the nineteenth century.

Now available in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death, this biography corrects many of the myths surrounding the often controversial Thomas Beecham. Thomas Beecham was one of Britain's greatest conductors of orchestral music and opera as well as an entrepreneur and impresario of exceptional energy and brilliant wit. This acclaimed biography places him - musically, politicallyand socially - in the troubled times in which he lived and corrects the stories and myths, many of them Beecham's own making, that have grown up around this uniquely gifted and controversial figure. Drawing upon extensive research, Lucas presents new material on his early years, his complicated private life, his father's catastrophic attempt to buy a large part of Covent Garden - which brought the family to its knees financially - and the orchestras andopera companies that Beecham founded. New light is shed on his visits to Nazi Germany and his view of its leaders, as well as the much misunderstood and previously unchronicled years of the Second World War, which he spent in Australia and America. Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music will remain the standard biography for years to come. JOHN LUCAS was on the staff of the Observer for 25 years, completed Peter Heyworth's monumentalbiography of Otto Klemperer, wrote Genius of Valhalla, the biography of Reginald Goodall, and is responsible for the current entries on Beecham and Klemperer in the New Grove .

John Lucas' account of the play considers the significance of Shakespeare's decision to break with the expectations of the Jacobean stage, of his treatment of sexual jealousy, of the contrasting (and complementary) worlds of court and country, and of the ways in which women successfully oppose male power. He also relates the play to a number of others in the canon in order to identify what is uniquely wonderful about The Winter's Tale. The Winter's Tale is a play in which Shakespeare chooses to flout the laws of dra matic probability. Not only are its two halves separated by a gap of 16 years, a man is eaten by a bear, a baby is miraculously saved from death by drowning, a statue no less miraculously comes to life. It is also a play which seems destined for a tragic outcome and yet which ends in reconciliation, in love restored, in a king's mad jealousy healed. Perhaps most importantly, in The Winter's Tale women become the active agents of good rather than the passive sufferers to which conventional role they seem condemned at the play's outset.