The Greatest British Literature

It wasn't called Beowulf until 1805 and was not printed till 1815, more than a millennium after its appearance in manuscript. But to early Anglo-Saxons, the slaying of the monster Grendel.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Translations • At the movies • Buy the book

It can be difficult to read Edward II today as a Christopher Marlow play. One keeps sliding into thinking of it as minor Shakespeare—you know, all those early plays with kings and numerals in their titles. Partly this is a matter of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Possibly Shakespeare's best-known play. Everyone knows the story of star-crossed lovers who defied their families—the feuding Capulets and Montagues—and ended their lives tragically. Romeo and Juliet is a play with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

I once read all Shakespeare's historical plays in chronological order. Not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the historical events they supposedly relate. Like many before me, I discovered that (1) the historical.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The major issue of contention whenever The Merchant of Venice comes up, of course, is the portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish money-lender, the villain of the piece for the most part. So let's deal with that first. On the side of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

This play ought to be called Brutus, since the central theme concerns that character's decision to join an assassination conspiracy and the repercussions of his action. The titular figure, Julius Caesar, is dispensed with by the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Hamlet is such a famous play—so much the great drama, the one that everyone in the world can quote at least six words from—that we usually can't see how strange it is that this should be so. Look at the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Interesting thing about Othello is that it concerns a man of African heritage who is victimized in a white European society, and yet racism is never the central issue. Othello, the "Moor of Venice", is done in by Iago's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

A straightforward play really, about a dysfunctional family. People thinks it's cosmic because of that annoying storm in the middle. That's not my opinion but the summary of Jonathan Miller, given in a television interview.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Macbeth was actually king of Scotland for seventeen years, though you would never get this from one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. Historians consider Macbeth and his wife to have been relatively good and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Shakespeare's sonnets have been dissected and speculated upon for profound and hidden meanings for years, but I think the best way into them for a novice is to consider them as Shakespeare having good fun—entertaining himself.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

A favourite play. Not exactly sure why. It doesn't present many of the elements generally admired in drama. No great tragedy. Not much scintillating wit. Little realism. A fantastic plot and several fantasy characters, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Perhaps the most shocking thing about 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is that it still shocks. John Ford's plays were written in a period of increasingly scandalous theatre. After Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Your first go at The Country Wife may leave you mystified. Especially mixed up over all the criss-crossing plots involving characters who can scarcely be told apart. They're all randy, witticism-spouting, wealthy layabouts.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

John Dryden's tragedy, All for Love, is basically a retooling of William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. You won't find Shakespeare's Cleopatra drama on the list of greatest plays, as it's not one of the Bard's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Aphra Behn's most famous work might disappoint a reader who has heard it's a staunchly anti-slavery, anti-colonialist or feminist work. One may find Oroonoko is none of those things, at least by modern standards.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

I'm not sure why The Rape of the Lock is Alexander Pope's most famous poem. I understand why it might have been popular in its day. It satirizes an incident that was infamous in a certain aristocratic crowd.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The biggest mystery about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe may be why it is so well known, so fondly remembered, so enshrined in our culture. As novels go, this is one dreadful piece of work.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

It's often called the first modern novel. Or, worse, a post-modern novel written before the modern had been invented. Which ought to turn off anyone looking for a good read. So here's the story of Laurence Sterne's.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is one of those "classic" works that is better known for its impact in its time that for its subsequent readability. It's more influential than admired. In fact, any reader today is likely.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The Vicar of Wakefield is supposed to be a satire, an ever gentle one in which the wide-eyed trust and peiety of the good pastor leave him at the mercy of larcenous rascals, until they have stripped him clean of everything.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Two things keep me from dismissing the drama She Stoops to Conquer as severely overrated. One: I don't recall seeing it performed. Live on stage it may be hilarious for all I know. And two: if it's overrated, it's been long.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Most modern collections of Robert Burns's works include poems and songs from throughout his life. You're unlikely to pick up an exact copy of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, his first published collection.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

In the dichotomy suggested in the title, Jane Austen in her first published work comes down conclusively on the side of sense over sensibility. It's supposed to be a study of two marriageable sisters with the eldest.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Pride and Prejudice has one of the most skilful beginnings in literature. It opens of course with that famous "truth universally acknowledged" about single men and fortunes—and its equally delicious corollary.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

If you're a Jane Austen aficionado, particularly loving her headstrong heroines picking their plucky but principled way through the constricting marriage plots of the time, Mansfield Park may come as.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

If you're not a Jane Austen admirer, Emma could be her novel you most despise. But if you are a fan, Emma is likely the one you most think shows how adept a writer she was. Austen set out in the last of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Northanger Abbey is the satire on popular literature Jane Austen had to write before she could get down to creating her own classics. It often happens in a first novel an author is driven to imitate and have fun with the work.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

By several standards Frankenstein is a very poorly written novel. The narrative wanders all over, bogging down in irrelevant subplots and extraneous characters, the characters (except for one) are thinly and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

It starts with an evening not at all dark or stormy, something like an ancient Greek dialogue actually—two friends meeting and discussing their dining plans. But already the signs of bad writing are evident. And.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Oliver Twist may be the novel most publicly associated with Dickens, though it's not nearly his best nor his most admired. It may also be the first major novel to feature a child as the central character.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Nicholas Nickleby is Charles Dickens still trying to work out how to sustain a novel. It's usually classified as his third novel, coming hard on the heels of the sketchy Pickwick Papers and the diversely stitched.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol, if not from reading Charles Dickens, then from incessant showings of the many film versions, especially at the holiday season. And everyone thinks they know the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Charlotte Brontë's narrator and protagonist, like many a youthful Dickens protagonist, is the epitome of spunk. But Jane Eyre is also female, a young girl to begin with and a young woman for much of.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

I'm somewhat stumped by Wuthering Heights. It's solidly ensconced in the literary canon and inflicted on classes of students. And plenty of people—readers and writers alike—seem to love it. But.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

The first half of David Copperfield, concerning a young boy's struggles against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most affecting novels ever written. The second half.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

For a few, Villette is Charlotte Brontë's big book—not just the longest of her four novels, but the most realistic, most interesting and most progressive. I fully understand this. There are times reading Villette I have to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Bleak House has its ardent admirers who declare it among Charles Dickens's masterpieces, as well as its detractors who call it one of his most grotesque potboilers. The author's strengths are.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

What's to like about Hard Times: A lot. It's short, for a Dickens novel. It's accessible—anyone can read it without a great deal of learning and without getting lost in convoluted descriptions. It's vivid—the characters are.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

You could make a case for every Charles Dickens novel being atypical in some way, but Little Dorrit really is a special case. It's been called his most political novel—the book George Bernard Shaw said converted him.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

It's the most political of Charles Dickens's novels, it's the least political—even anti-political—of Dickens's novels in some ways. But its positions on politics, revolution, mob rule, democracy and reformism has tended to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

In the argument about whether The Woman in White or The Moonstone is Wilkie Collins's first great mystery novel—and thus arguably the first great mystery novel ever—a compromise is generally found.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

George Eliot's first great popular novel gives only hints of the depths to be plumbed in the future, yet it has become an enduring favourite for its own virtues. In many ways, The Mill on the Floss is a silly romantic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

The greatest expectation to be quashed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David Copperfield or.... Critique • Other views • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

The Moonstone is sometimes presented as the first great mystery novel. It wasn't the first of its kind though. Wilkie Collins's own The Woman in White eight years earlier featured a mystery and a crime-solving detective.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's an irony of sorts that Edward Bulwer-Lytton's most influential book may be his last, one of his shortest, written in a genre different from everything else he had done to that point, and not even published under his own.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

I'm not sure we should even call Erewhon a novel. If it is one, it's a novel of ideas. Not like, say, one of Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas though. Great ideas don't play out among characters or decide the plot. In Butler's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first great novel and the one that made his reputation. It also might be the only real crowd-pleaser among his great works. For it not only has tragedy, intrigue, betrayal.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

No one needs to be told what Treasure Island is about. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel has defined the pirate story, not to mention the treasure-hunting story, the mutiny-on-the-seas story—and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

I don't know whether it's still being taught to teens but The Mayor of Casterbridge turned me off Thomas Hardy for many years after studying it in high school. Too melodramatic, too full of ridiculous coincidences and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

In the article on John Buchan, I called his novels seminal thrillers surpassed by the later best-selling works of intrigue for which they showed the way. Stevenson's Kidnapped takes us back yet another generation.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The surprising thing about Robert Louis Stevenson's horror story, if you had previously known the Jekyll and Hyde character only indirectly through popular culture, is that it's so brief. Not only is the novella.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

When Tess of the D'Urbervilles first came out in book form in late 1891, it was in equal parts hailed as Thomas Hardy's masterpiece and condemned as a moral outrage. The latter opinion was due mainly to the novel's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

When we're talking about Arthur Conan Doyle's contribution to detective literature, we really mean the entire oeuvre of fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories, plus four Holmes novels. But if you're looking.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

In the year or so after publication of his first volume of stories featuring his popular detective, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1992), Arthur Conan Doyle produced two novels, a collection of short.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Jude the Obscure is the novel whose reception, coming five years after the similar scandal of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is famous for leading Hardy to quit writing novels. The book was widely denounced as "Jude the Obscene".... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

A Shropshire Lad hasn't much to do with Shropshire. A.E. Housman famously had little personal acquaintance with that part of the English countryside, and his local references in his "Shropshire" poems are either generically.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Lord Jim is one of the Joseph Conrad novels that has me thinking at times "This may be the best writing I've ever read" and at other times "Come on, get on with it, would you?" Part of this ambivalence can be put down to... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

If Rudyard Kipling were to publish his most acclaimed novel today, he would likely face more than the usual charges of colonialism and imperialism that have been levelled at him through much of the twentieth century.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

You think you know Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness even if you haven't read it in years, or ever. It's been widely taught in school, so its most famous lines ring with musty familiarity. Its plot has been adapted for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

First thing you have to do is forget all the movie and television productions you might have seen of this tale. Those misty, moody scenes on the moors.... The horror of the hound from hell, eyes blazing as.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Samuel Butler never published The Way of All Flesh in his lifetime, being unsatisfied with it. I can understand why he might have wanted to rework it. The story is skimpy, again being sandwiched among pages and chapters.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Is there life after death? Or putting it differently, could a legendary literary character, killed off by his creator, recapture his former magic if he's resurrected eleven years later? In the case of Sherlock Holmes.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

It is difficult to separate The Forsyte Saga from the justly acclaimed films and television series based on it. The adaptations have enchanted everyone who followed them, most of whom have likely never read the books. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

With a few exceptions, I dislike the kind of horror and fantasy that's in your face—tales that start with incredible, supernatural phenomena and then keep building on it, getting wilder and wilder. It just seems...well.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Joseph Conrad's novel of a century earlier was apparently widely read again, especially in Western intelligence circles. I'm not sure, though, what those new readers.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

If you come to G.K. Chesterton's avowed masterpiece expecting a piece of early twentieth-century realism, you're going to be very surprised. If you've heard it's a mystery—hopefully along the lines of the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

The Innocence of Father Brown is the first of five collections of mystery stories featuring G.K. Chesterton's canny priest. It's probably the best collection and it introduces the holy detective—as well as his.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

At least one reprint edition of Under Western Eyes is decorated with nautical graphics, as someone must have thought befitting a Joseph Conrad yarn. Not realizing, of course, this is a Conrad story unlike almost any other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

There is not a lot to say about the narrative structure or the characters or the writing in this famous novel. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a seminal tale of intrigue, a classic early story of an innocent man drawn into dark.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Eliot's masterwork? The poetic masterpiece of the twentieth century? Here's the problem I have with that: I don't like reading The Waste Land. It's hard. Lines in foreign languages. References to classical literature.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

All the important elements of Eliot's longer, more difficult poem The Waste Land are in "The Hollow Men". The view of this world as insubstantial, a realm for the living dead. The attempts to revive religious concepts, to offer.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Partway though a rereading of Mrs Dalloway a sudden idea threatened to upset everything I had ever thought about the author. Was it possible Virginia Woolf was really making fun of her insufferably effete lead.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

This novel hasn't a single character one is likely to care about. Normally this would be the death knell for a piece of fiction. But somehow To the Lighthouse won immediate acclaim upon publication in 1925 and has ever since.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's the ultimate novel of ideas. A book of characters who spend most of their time spouting thoughts on big topics like love, religion, science, politics and sex. That is, when they're not engaging in the latter. In the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

A lot of mystery novels don't stand up to repeated readings. Makes sense. Once you know the ending—once the mystery has been solved—the tension in the slow buildup to the conclusion is dissipated. Plot holes.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Some writers are not really good novelists—don't seem to have the artistic talents to shape words, sentences and paragraphs into conventional novelistic form—and yet can recognize a great story and marshal the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

British mystery authors like to place their imagined crimes in the hallowed halls of distinguished universities. Maybe they hope uncovering wickedness in the English and classics departments distinguishes their.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Why critics think Eyeless in Gaza is Aldous Huxley's greatest novel: It's very long. It's his most difficult novel, using a fractured timeline, so we follow several narratives that occur during Anthony Beavis's life almost.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Despite issues with objectionable titling over the years, And Then There were None has been not only the most popular novel by Agatha Christie during her long, prolific career, but one of the best-selling books of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Darkness at Noon was not quite what I had expected, based on what I had heard. Fans and critics had described it as presenting the ordeal of an innocent man charged during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Torture.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Animal Farm is a work I include on the list of greatest works under protest. It's not that I dislike George Orwell. I like most of his work very much. Nor do I consider Animal Farm particularly bad. It's very cleverly done for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Why do we still read Brideshead Revisited? An account of aimless, upper-class, young men wasting their time at Oxford University in hedonism. Until the story is swallowed by the larger theme of an intensely.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

By rights, there should be little interest remaining in Graham Greene's 1948 story of a white colonialist policeman, wracked with guilt over his lapsed Catholicism, corruption, career failures and duplicitous relationships.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

George Orwell's dystopian novel has had the fortune to be acclaimed in the West by two usually opposed groups—right wingers and left wingers. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It takes Nevil Shute a long time in this novel to get to the town of Alice (Alice Springs actually), and even longer to get to the town like Alice. The building of a new town in Australia is only a minor part of A Town Like Alice.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Let's deal with the religious aspect of the Narnia works right off the top. The idea that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and its successive novels present a Christian allegory is raised by both detractors and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The biggest obstacle to properly appreciating The Quiet American as a novel may be Graham Greene's uncanny political prescience. In the 1950s, when Vietnam wasn't yet on the radar for most Western readers, when U.S.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's interesting and odd that On the Beach and On the Road came out the same year. Both are dated 1957, but how very different they are. Only the accident of their titles being sequential in an alphabetical list.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

If The Crystal World were a typical science fiction novel about an impending global disaster, it'd have scientists and military heroes working against the clock trying to stop the apocalypse. In J.G. Ballard's world.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

A superior espionage novel can engage your sympathy with opposing characters. At the fantasy end of the thriller spectrum one can dreamily identify with a super-heroic agent and cheer the demise of a villainous.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

To get an idea of what the Hitchhiker's Trilogy is like, you have only to read the titles of the five novels that comprise it: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

After his post-apocalyptic tales of psychological horror, after his scandalous work on human mangling and perverse sexuality, J.G. Ballard turned to producing his most conventional, biographical and realistic.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The Quincunx is an absolutely stunning literary achievement. More than that, it's a great read. A lot has been made of its technical brilliance. The late-twentieth century author Charles Palliser created a novel in the style of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It may seem odd an acclaimed series of novels near the end of the twentieth century should feature characters from the period of the First World War. Or that issues from that war time should continue to resonate with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's hard not to think "classic" as you're reading Atonement. Especially in the first half with its scenes of country estate life, reminiscent of Jane Austen or the Brontë novels, as experienced through the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book