The Penguin Writers' Guides series provides authoritative, succinct and easy-to-follow guidance on specific aspects of written English. Whether you need to brush up your skills or get to grips with something for the first time, these invaluable Guides will help you find the best way to get your message across clearly and effectively. This essential guide covers the key rules - and pitfalls - of written and spoken grammar. It covers such areas as: the building blocks of language, common errors and misconceptions, choosing the right level of expression, differences between British and American English, and political correctness. It also discusses various uses of language, from creative writing, CVs and reports to verbal presentations, and business and personal letters, with many useful suggestions for accurate and fluent English.

Presents a two-volume A to Z reference on English authors from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, providing information about major figures, key schools and genres, biographical information, author publications and some critical analyses.

This anthology represents some of the best African poetry written in English in the last 30 years. The poets include Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Kojo Laing, Chenjerai Hove and Gabriel Gbadamosi.

Using a wealth of contemporary sources, this book tells the story of the way in which the turbulent, hedonistic world of mid-nineteenth-century Paris touched the careers and work of a host of Victorian writers, major and minor. It attends both to the way writers actually experienced life in a capital city markedly different from London, and to how they retailed this to a swiftly-growing British readership. En route, it reveals the cosmopolitan world of the salonsand the social life of the British Embassy; demonstrates the risky competitive world of the freelance journalist; traces the developing role of the foreign correspondent, and examines the, sometimescontradictory, prejudices about Paris and the Parisians contained in contemporary fiction.Casting a wide literary net, the first part of this book explores these writers' reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Parisfor mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists, paying particular attention to the ways in which the young Thackeray's exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. Thefinal part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly-growing British readership.

Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

This wide-ranging study of British writers and poets of the 1930s--including Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Waugh, and Greene-- examines the masterpieces of that momentous decade, not in linguistic isolation, but in the contexts--social, political, historical, ideological, and personal--in which they were composed. Cunningham maps out the dominant images and concerns, nothing less than the central obsessions and imposing images of the '30s imagination. He analyzes the obsession with violence, the "destructive element" of post-World War consciousness; the cult of youth, of schools and schoolmasters; the infatuation with heroes--flyers, mountaineers, and racing car drivers--and the related concern about "being small," weak, or neurotic in an age of mass politics. In order to illustrate this kaleidoscope of themes, Cunningham examines not only the canonical texts, but also "minor" forms and writings, including detective stories, films, and popular songs, showing how these neglected genres also illuminate the work of this period.