A group of a few women born in the second decade of the century might together illustrate the diversity of the twentieth-century novelist's interests. Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), the author the novels The Soul of Kindness and Blaming, is a refined stylist whose swift flashes of dialogue and reflection and deft sketches of the wider background give vitality to her portrayals of well-to-do family life in commuter land. Some of her later novels are In a Summer Season (1961), and The Wedding Group (1968.) Elizabeth Taylor has humour and compassion as well as disciplined artistry, and has logically been compared with Jane Austen.
So has Barbara Pym (1913-1980) who tasted fame, sadly enough, only at the end of her life (her real name was Mary Crampton). Another restrained and perceptive artist, she is a master of J f ingenuous and candid dialogue and reflection which are resonant with comic overtones. Critics I called her "modern Jane Austin. Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958) were reprinted in the late 1970s when Philip Larkin and David Cecil drew attention to the quality of her neglected work. Later novels, The Sweet Dove Died (1978) and Quartet in Autumn (1978), are no less engaging in their blend of pathos and comedy.
One might well put beside these two English writers the Irish writer Mary Lavin (1912-1996), whose short stories focus on the ups and downs of family life with quiet pathos and humour. Her novels, The House in Clewes Street (1945) and Mary O'Grady (1950), are family histories presented with psychological sensitivity and a delicious vein of irony.
The public domain intrudes more into the work of Olivia Manning (1917-1980) who found herself, with her husband, in Bucharest in 1939, to be driven by German advances first to Greece, then to Egypt. She recorded her experience in her Balkan Trilogy: The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and Friends and He roes (1965), documenting how people behaved as the Nazi menace encroached on English residents. The private story of Harriet Prin-gle and her husband Guy is one of colliding temperaments. л
Another woman who was in the right place at the right time as a future novelist is Doris * * Lessing (b.1919), brought up in Southern Rhodesia. Her sequence of five novels called Children of Violence begins with Martha Quest (1952) and tells the story of Martha's upbringing and development. It is a story of personal search and struggle, by a self-centered woman, against the fetters of sexual, social and political conventions. Her latest novels of 2005 are The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter and Griot and the Snow Dog.
The fascination of the twentieth century history has touched other writers too. Richard Hughes's (1900-1976) two volumes of his trilogy, The Human Predicament, on events that culminated in the Second World War, include The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1972), covering the years from Hitler's putsch in 1923 to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
William Trevor (b.1928), is an Irish novelist and short-story writer of broader range and richer gifts, perhaps the most distinctive novelist to emerge since William Golding and Muriel Spark. In The Old Boys (1964) he focuses on a group of cranky old human misfits in a story of an old boys' association and their annual reunion, and in The Boarding House (1965) on the inhabitants of an establishment equally conducive to the harbouring of mildly potty and * / inadequate individuals. Trevor's terse, crisp dialogue, and his dry, detached portrayal of seediness, ill-humour are fetchingly entertaining. And there is compassion too. Trevor extended his range in Mrs Eckdorfin O'Neill's Hotel (1970). A woman photographer is seeking material for her next coffee-table documentary at a Dublin hotel that has decayed from its former splendour and is now used as a brothel. Trevor has continued to be productive as a novelist (The Children ofDynmouth, 1976, and Other People's Worlds, 1980), and he is also a versatile writer of short stories. The tales in Angels at the Ritz (1974) show an interest in personal experiences of frustration and anti-climax which naturally called out comparisons with Joyce's Dubliners. In

2000 W.Trevor published The Hill Bachelors, delicately revelatory Irish stories and worries about ageing and family. The Story of Luce Gault (2002) and A Bit On the Side (2004), a collection of short stories on adultery, are William Trevor's latest books.
A talent of matching distinction, if not of comparable imaginative range, is that of Jennifer Johnston (b.1930), the daughter of the Irish playwright Denis Johnston, herself a novelist and a playwright. She portrays the Anglo-Irish landed gentry with a subtle registration of their awkward relationship to.local peasants and retainers. Since her first novel The Captains and the * / Kings (1972) she has published many novels. In The Gates (1973) Major MacMa- hon decays alcoholically while his orphaned niece finds consolation with a peasant boy. In How Many Miles to Babylon (1974) Irish heir and peasant boy go off to fight together as officer and private in the First World War, and the mechanical pressures of military discipline turn their impulsive affection for each other into a cause of tragedy. Her novel The Gingerbread Woman (2000) is a story of personal tragedy intersecting with the national one in present-day Ireland inside a novel being written by the main woman character. Other novels include: The Invisible Worm (1991), dealing with the subject of sexual abuse; This is Not a Novel (2002), and most recently published Grace and Truth (2005).
Among younger novelists now at work A. N. Wilson (b.1950) has a comparably beguiling sense of humour. In The Healing Art (1980) X-ray reports on two Oxford women are mixed up so that the housewife wrongly thinks she is clear and the English don, Pamela Cooper, struggles unnecessarily to accommodate herself to a death sentence. Pamela, an Anglo-Catholic, is persuaded to seek miraculous healing at the shrine at Walsingham and a seeming miracle ensues. Wilson's registration of the contemporary scene is acutely ironic; yet his strength is that he is not • . pure satirist, pure humourist or pure moralist, but a piquant blend of all three. The humour is the \ sharper for the moral seriousness with which it runs in harness.
Sheila Jansen grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. In her mid- twenties she moved to London where she spent ten years before going to America. She lives in California with her husband, professor of wild-land sciences.
Sheila Jansen created a brilliant novel Mary Maddison (1991) about a tragic fate of Elizabeth and her little daughter Mary after the death of Mary's grandparents when her uncle Joseph inherited everything and drove Elizabeth and her daughter off the house. "Look here, Elizabeth, I can lend you a few pounds to help you get started and you can pay me back when you get a job." To which Elizabeth replied: "You can keep your conscience money." Forced to leave the family home they face the deprivation of one of Newcastle's poorer areas. Elizabeth, tired and exhausted by daily work died of diabetes the day before Mary's thirteen birthday and Mary's wanderings in life began. Mary becomes a factory worker where she meets Joe Cowley. When she gets pregnant Joe refuses to bear any responsibility for the child. Mary is thrown back on her own resources once more.
Amanda Brookfield (b.1960), an Oxford graduate with a First Class Honour degree lives \ i with her family in South London. Her best novels are Alice Alone, A Cast of Smiles, Walls of ■ Glass, The Lover, A family Man. Her latest novel Sisters and Husbands was published in 2002. It's a breathtaking story about two sisters - Anna Lawrence, with a successful career in broadcasting and marriage to David, a wealthy man with a luxurious country home, and Becky, who lives in a dilapidated house in South London, and has to contend with her husband Joe who is struggling to become the chef, and Jenny, his eleven-year-old daughter of the first marriage.
Edward Rutherfurd (b.1948) was born in Salisbury, and educated in Wiltshire and Cambridge. For some time he lived in New York, but returned to his roots to research and write the novel Sarum, based on the history of his native town Salisbury. His second novel Russka tells the history of Russia from the Cossack horsemen of the steppes to the events of the Bolshevik revolution. His newer work is the historical novel London (1997) - a saga about the Лекция 4 5 курс Стаханов most magnificent city in the world from the days of the Romans through sixteen centuries to the Victorian time and the end of the twentieth century. The last chapter 21 is dated by 1997. Ruther- furd's latest novels, published in 2005, include The Princess of Ireland and The Rebels of Ireland.
Andrew Taylor (b.1965) has written over twenty books, mainly crime novels and thrillers. They include the series featuring William Dougal, a detective who occasionally commits murders as well as solves them; an espionage trilogy whose chronology stretches from the 1930s to the 1980s; psychological thrillers; and books for younger readers. His first novel Caroline Minuscule appeared in 1982. Then came the psychological thriller The Office of the Dead (2000), (the third volume of the Roth Trilogy), and Death's Own Door (2001), the sixth novel in the Lydmouth Series, which is set about fifty years ago on the Anglo-Welsh borders. His latest novels also include The Judgement of Strangers (1998), Where Roses Fade (2000), Requiem For an Angel (2002), The American Boy (2003) and Call the Dying (2004).
Laura Wilson (b.1939) has worked briefly as a teacher, and more successfully as an editor of non-fiction books. She has written history books for children and is interested in history, particularly of the recent past, painting and sculpture, uninhabited buildings, underground structures, cemeteries and time capsules. She has published the psychological crime novels, A Little Death and Dying Voices, and My Best Friend, which was published in 2001. These are but just a few more names of masters of pen of the newest period Modern Poetry
John BETJEMAN (1906-1984)
Born in 1906, John Betjeman is considered the most popular British poet of the twentieth century. Raised in London, Betjeman attended Highgate Junior School and Malborough before going on to Oxford University. During his younger years „Betjeman studied briefly with T.S Eliot.
The British poet has earned countless awards and but his poetry is considered difficult to characterize. He had a challenging relationship with his father and Betjeman was very sensitive about his German sounding name. The poet's father had high hopes his son would follow him into the furniture making business - unfortunately Betjeman had no interest in business, instead he want to make his living through his writing.
Those two issues play out in a defensive nature in his poetry. His sensitive side comes through at times, especially when he mentions the relationship with his father in his works. However, though his ability to move a reader was significant, he was best known for his funny poetry. Though his quirkiness appealed to the public, the lack of seriousness did not always set well with critics and therefore he has seen little academic discussion since his passing in 1984. In response to his campiness and humorous trend, Betjeman indicated that it was often easier to express serious feelings in the form of a joke or light poem. Said Betjeman, "I very rarely talk about what I really feel."
More than just a poet, Betjeman also served as a broadcaster and wrote many pieces championing Britain's long heritage. Betjeman's "Collected Poems" published in 1958 made history. That single work has since sold more than two and a quarter million copies. Betjeman was knighted in 1969 and designated England's Poet Laureate in 1972. His last published book of poetry, "A Nip in The Air," was published in 1974. Shortly thereafter, he began suffering from Parkinson's Disease and then, from a series of strokes.
John Betjeman died on May 19th, 1984.
Langston HUGHES
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was the first black writer in America to earn his living from writing. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he had a migratory childhood following his parents' separation,

spending time in the American Mid-West and Mexico. He attended Columbia University from 1921-1922 but left, disillusioned by the coolness of his white peers. Hughes' experience of racial exclusion was compounded by his sexual orientation which made him doubly separate from the "norm" of white society. His homosexuality remained hidden throughout his life, and referred to in his writing only through coded references, in the manner of one of his literary heroes, Walt Whitman. However, he did feel able to speak out against the racial oppression he witnessed all around him and had experienced first hand, and his first poems were published in the magazine Crisis which was run by which was run by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After leaving University, Hughes travelled, first on a freighter to Africa - where the lack of political and economic freedom of the native people disturbed him - and then extensively in Europe before heading back to the USA. On his return he published his first collection, The Weary Blues, to great acclaim. From 1928-1930 he lived in New York and was a prominent member of the 'Harlem Renaissance', the name given to the flowering of intellectual and cultural activity amongst the black community of New York at the time. As well as poetry, Hughes's prolific output included plays, essays and articles, some of which expressed his < / admiration for the Soviet Union and socialist principles. This led him to be investigated by the * McCarthy Committee during the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s and it took a while for him to restore his reputation. However, by the 1960s his services to literature were recognized by the government and he was made a cultural emissary to Europe and Africa for the US State Department. Hughes died in 1967 in New York having lived into the Decade of Protest and seen many of the reforms he'd fought for introduced.
This recording features two of Hughes's best known poems. One of Hughes's poetic innovations was to draw on the rhythms of black musical traditions such as jazz and blues, but in 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' it's the heritage of Negro spirituals which is recalled by the poem's majestic imagery and sonorous repetitions. Written when Hughes was only seventeen as he travelled by train across the Mississippi, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' is a beautiful statement of strength in the history of black people, which Hughes imagines stretching as far back as ancient Egypt and further into Africa and the cradle of civilisation. The poem returns at the end to America in a moment of optimistic alchemy when he sees the "muddy bosom" of the Mississippi "turn all golden in the sunset".
This recording was made in 1955 by the jazz specialist label, Folkways. * /
Philip LARKIN
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a poet whose very name conjures up a specific persona: the gloomy, death-obsessed and darkly humorous observer of human foibles and failings. The truth, both about the man and his work, is more complex, but the existence of the popular image points to Larkin's broader cultural influence, beyond the world of poetry. His personal reputation has sometimes suffered, particularly following the publication of his letters which revealed veins of right-wing opinion, but he remains much loved for his "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent" (as defined by Jean Hartley of the Marvell Press). Born in Coventry, Larkin was the son of a Nazi-sympathising father who worked as the City Treasurer, and a mother to whom he felt a strong, though sometimes claustrophobic attachment. The "forgotten boredom" of his childhood was followed by a much more colourful period at Oxford University where he formed several important friendships with, amongst others, Kingsley Amis. Larkin's first job after University, running a local library in Shropshire, became his wage-earning career for the rest of his life, taking him to university libraries in Leicester, Belfast and finally Hull, where he stayed for thirty years. This lack of professional eventfulness was matched, at least on the surface, by j * his private life: despite several long-standing relationships with women, Larkin never married. \
Initially Larkin concentrated on writing fiction, producing two novels in the 1940s. His first poetry collection, The North Ship (1945) was heavily influenced by Yeats and did not yet present the voice for which he later became famous. The mature Philip Larkin style - that of the detached, sometimes lugubrious, sometimes tender observer of "ordinary people doing ordinary things" (Jean Hartley) - first appears in his second collection, The Less Deceived, published ten years later. The virtues of this poetic persona, its plainness and scepticism, came to be associated with The Movement, the post-war generation of poets brought together in the New Lines anthology of 1956. Two more collections followed at similarly lengthy intervals: The Whitsun Weddings (1965), considered by many to be his finest achievement, and High Windows (1974). In his final decade, Larkin's poetic inspiration largely failed, and he produced only a handful of poems before his death from cancer in 1985. This loss of inspiration was one of the reasons he turned down the post of Poet Laureate, offered to him the year before his death, though the fact he was first choice for it underlines the high regard in which he was held, despite his slight output.
Larkin was a fine reader of his work and the Archive is delighted to be able to present for the first time extracts from a newly-discovered recording dating from the early 1980s. It was made by John Weeks, the sound archivist at Hull University, and so a colleague of Larkin's. Despite the relaxed circumstances in which the sessions were recorded (on a series of Sunday afternoons following a leisurely lunch) the sound quality is excellent. Significant too is the extent of the recording: in choosing to readjust shy of thirty poems, Larkin seems to be offering an overview of his career, as if aware he was nearing its end. The tapes were discovered in a garage by Mr Weeks' son and a commercial release will be forthcoming from Faber & Faber in January 2009. In the meantime, Archive listeners can enjoy a preview of Larkin's expert delivery of three of his most famous poems: 'Mr Bleaney1, 'The Whitsun Weddings' and The Trees'. Larkin's voice on the page - full of hesitations and qualifications which give the impression of a mind caught in the act of thinking - is particularly suited to reading aloud. Larkin once said of his poems that he wanted to give readers the impression of "a chap chatting to chaps" and certainly his understated delivery does the colloquial aspect of his poetry justice. But this tone is balanced in these poems by a hard-won lyricism, transcendence even, especially in the final stanza of 'The Whitsun Weddings' which shifts the language of the poem from realist description into heightened metaphor with the beautiful image of gathering emotional momentum as an arrow shower "somewhere becoming rain". It is such sudden openings, coupled with the subtle music of his highly-structured but flexible verse forms, that lifts Larkin's poetry beyond the misanthropy of which he sometimes stands accused.The Poetry Archive is very grateful to Mr Weeks for allowing us to make use of this valuable recording. Seamus Heaney
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995
Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father's real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer's way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. The poet's mother came from a family called McCann whose connections were more with the modern world than with the traditional rural economy; her uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and an aunt had worked "in service" to the mill owners' family. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. His father was notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the "quarrel with himself out of which his poetry arises.

Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. As a very young child5 he watched American soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields, in preparation for the Normandy invasion of 1944. They were stationed at an aerodrome which had been built a mile or so from his home and once again Heaney has taken this image of himself as a consciousness poised between "history and ignorance" as representative of the nature of his poetic life and \ / development. Even though his family left the farm where he was reared (it was called * Mossbawn) in 1953, and even though his life since then has been a series 6f moves farther and farther away from his birthplace, the departures have been more geographical than psychological: rural County Deny is the "country of the mind" where much of Heaney's poetry is still grounded.When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Deny, forty miles away from the home farm, and this first departure from Mossbawn was the decisive one. It would be followed in years to come by a transfer to Belfast where he lived between 1957 and 1972, and by another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where Heaney has made his home, and then, since 1982, by regular, annual periods of teaching in America. All of these subsequent shifts and developments were dependent, however, upon that original journey from Mossbawn which the poet has described as a removal from "the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education." It is not surprising, then, that this move has turned out to be a recurrent theme in his work, from "Digging", the first poem in his first book, through the much more orchestrated treatment of it in "Alphabets"(The Haw Lantern, 1987), to its most recent appearance in "A Sofa in the Forties" which was published this year in The Spirit Level.At St. Columb's College, Heaney was taught * / Latin and Irish, and these languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study while a student of Queen's University, Belfast, were determining factors in many of the developments and retrenchments which have marked his progress as a poet. The first verses he wrote when he was a young teacher in Belfast in the early 1960s and many of the best known poems in North, his important volume published in 1975, are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in English. His poetic line was much more resolutely stressed and packed during this period than it would be in the eighties and nineties when the "Mediterranean" elements in the literary and linguistic heritage of English became more pronounced. Station Island (1984) reveals Dante, for example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of Virgil - as well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid - are to be found in Seeing Things (1991). Heaney's early study of Irish bore fruit in the translation of the Middle Irish story of Suibhne Gealt in Sweeney Astray (1982) and in several other translations and echoes and allusions: the Gaelic heritage has always has been part of his larger keyboard of reference and remains culturally and politically central to the poet and his work.Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was active as one of a group of poets who were subsequently recognized as constituting something of a j i "Northern School" within Irish writing. Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally i different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he does share with all of them the fate of having be en born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. The essays in Heaney's three main prose collections, but especially those in The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), bear witness to the seriousness which this question assumed for him as he was coming into his own as a writer.These concerns also lie behind Heaney's involvement for a decade and a half with Field Day, a theatre company founded in 1980 by the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Real. Here, he was also associated with the poets Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin, and the singer David Hammond in a project which sought to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its members into productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in Irish political life. Through a series of plays and pamphlets (culminating in Heaney's case in his version of Sophocles' Philoctetes which the company produced and toured in 1990 under the title, The Cure at Troy), Field Day contributed greatly to the vigour of the cultural debate which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland.Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who was to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like her husband, came from a large family, several of whom are themselves writers and artists, including the poet's wife who has recently published an important collection of retellings of the classic Irish myths and legends (Over Nine Waves, 1994). Marie Heaney has been central to the poet's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home.The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was the sense of self-challenge and new scope which he experienced in the American context that encouraged him to resign his lectureship at Queen's University (1966-72) not long after he returned to Ireland, and to move to a cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full time as a poet and free-lance writer. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and Searnus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of the English Department until 1982, when his present arrangement with Harvard University came into existence. This allows the poet to spend eight months at home without teaching in exchange for one semester's work at Harvard. In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university's most prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year period to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public lectures every year but which does not require him to reside in Oxford.In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. While a young lecturer at Queen's University, he was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the rising generation and took over the running of an influential poetry workshop which had been established there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966. He also served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences, establishing a special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.