Neil McEwan

James Joyce 1882–1941

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin and educated at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, Dublin, and University College, Dublin. He visited Paris in 1902 and soon afterwards finding Ireland’s Catholicism narrow and intolerant he left, to spend the rest of his life abroad. Ireland, none the less, was to be the inspiration of all his writings. He taught English in Trieste, living with Nora Barnacle, the mother of his son and daughter. They moved to Zurich in 1915 and lived in Paris after the war, struggling with poverty and illness. Joyce published a volume of verse, Chamber Music, in 1907 and Dubliners, a collection of stories, in 1914. A play Exiles was performed in Munich in 1918. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel about a Catholic upbringing, appeared as a serial, 1914–15. Joyce outraged the Church, the Law and much of the literary world with his second novel Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922 and confiscated by the British Customs in 1923. (It was not legally available in Britain until 1933.) This strange masterpiece is unusual in its structure, which depends on correspondences with Homer’s Odyssey, and in its style, which records the minds of its characters during one Dublin day, in a ‘stream of consciousness’, full of puns, allusions, fantasy, parody and unfastidious realism.

Isaac Rosenberg 1890–1918

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and was brought up in the East End of London where he went to school. He then attended the Slade School of Art, published two books of verse, Night and Day (1912) and Youth (1915), and enlisted in the ranks in 1915. He was killed in action. The quality of his war poems was not widely recognised until his Collected Works appeared in 1937.

Winston Churchill 1874–1965

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and grandson of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. He was educated at Harrow and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He recounted his military adventures in My Early Life (1903). Early books about army campaigns were followed by Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909), The World Crisis (4 vols, 1923–9), and Marlborough: his Life and Times (1933–8), among many other publications. The extent of his writing is extraordinary, given the demands of political life and office. War Speeches 1940–45 (1946) was followed by The Second World War (6 vols, 1948–54), and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 vols, 1956–8). As an historian and as an orator, he revived the grand style of English prose. He was too grandiloquent for some; but W. W. Robson has rightly said of his speeches as Prime Minister in the early 1940s that ‘he used English literature as a weapon of war’. Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

Rupert Brooke 1887–1915

Rupert Chawner Brooke was born at Rugby, the son of a master at Rugby School. He was educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge. When he became a Fellow of King’s in 1912 he was already well known for Poems 1911 and for the verses contributed to the first volume (1912) of the series Georgian Poetry. In 1913 he travelled through North America to Tahiti. The five ‘War Sonnets’ published in New Numbers in 1915 when he was with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve gave him a fame which grew after his death, from blood-poisoning, at Scyros, although men in the trenches found their tone false. Collected Poems (1918) was followed by Poetical Works (1946), which contains additional pieces.

Rudyard Kipling 1865–1936

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay but educated in England, at the United Services College. As a journalist in India from 1882 to 1889, he published the stories and poems collected in Departmental Ditties (1886), Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Soldiers Three (1890) and Wee Willie Winkie (1890). He lived in England from 1889 to 1892 and, with his American wife, in Vermont from 1892 until 1896 when the Kiplings returned to England. Barrack Room Ballads (1892) had made him famous. The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) are among the best books ever written for children. Kim (1901) is his masterpiece. Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His wholehearted enthusiasm for the British Empire and an element of swagger in some books have clouded his achievement but his imagination and versatility are beyond dispute.

Hilaire Belloc 1870–1953

Joseph Hilary Pierre Belloc was born in France, but educated at the Oratory School, Birmingham, and Balliol College, Oxford. He became a British subject in 1902 and was Liberal MP for Salford, from 1906 to 1909, and again in 1910, after which he abandoned politics. He was a prolific and popular writer, associated in readers’ minds with his friend and fellow-Catholic, G. K. Chesterton. Belloc wrote novels and books of history, travel — The Path to Rome (1902) — essays and verse. He is best known today for his ‘cautionary tales’ — whimsical verses which parody nineteenth-century ‘moral’ poems for children. He was also a gifted writer of epigrams. His Collected Verse was published in 1958.

H. G. Wells 1866–1946

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, and educated at the Normal School of Science, in Kensington. He was a schoolteacher and journalist for a while; he published A Textbook of Biology in 1893. The Time Machine (1895) was the first of a series of works of science fiction. Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) are classic novels of lower-middle-class life and Tono-Bungay (1909) is a shrewd social comedy. Wells wrote prolifically. His Outline of History (1920) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933) were widely popular, educational books. A Fabian Socialist, Wells believed in social reform and in science, but his last books, including The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939) and Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), are very pessimistic. He was quick to see the dangers of science.

W. H. Auden 1907–73

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York and educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford. His first books of verse, Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), and Look, Stranger! (1936), established him as the ablest and most influential poet of his generation, a metrical genius, achieving, in elegant colloquial verse, a voice which impressed readers of the 1930s as a civilised reply to the stridency of fascism. Auden travelled in Germany, Iceland, China and, in 1937, Spain (in the Republican cause). His writings of this period were fashionably left-wing. He often worked in collaboration: with Christopher Isherwood (1904–85), on plays, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F 6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1938), and an account of their visit to China, Journey to a War (1939); he wrote Letters from Iceland (1937) with Louis MacNeice (1907–63); Benjamin Britten set his verse to music and based his first opera, Paul Bunyan (1941), on Auden’s script. Auden went to America early in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. A new collection of poems, Another Time, was published in 1940. New Year Letter (1941), an essay in verse which ends with a prayer, was the beginning of the Christian outlook of his increasingly complex post-war verse. For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio and The Sea and the Mirror (dramatic monologues based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest) appeared in 1944, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue in 1948, The Shield of Achilles in 1955.

William Golding 1911

William Golding, born at St Columb Minor in Cornwall, was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. He worked in the theatre and then became a schoolmaster. In the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he commanded a rocket ship. Lord of the Flies (1954), his first novel, has been very successful indeed. The Inheritors (1955), whose characters are Neanderthals, and The Spire (1964), which has a medieval setting, are less accessible but perhaps more rewarding. Golding’s other novels are Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Pyramid (1967), Darkness Visible (1979), Rites of Passage (1980), and The Paper Men (1984). He has also published stories (The Scorpion God, 1971), essays (The Hot Gates, 1965) and a play (The Brass Butterfly, 1958). His theme is the fallen, cruel nature of man; his settings are varied and usually removed from familiar social milieux; symbolism and fable are conspicuous features of his work. Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

W. B. Yeats 1865–1939

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin and educated at the Godolphin School, London, the High School, Dublin, and the School of Art, Dublin. His early volumes of romantic pre-Raphaelite verse were fortified by knowledge of Irish songs and legends. In 1896 he met Lady Gregory, an Anglo-Irish widow, with whom he founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (1904). His love for Maud Gonne, a fervent nationalist for whom he wrote the play The Countess Cathleen (performed in Dublin in 1899), involved him in Irish political movements; these activities later helped to make him a Senator in the Irish Free State (1922–8). In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910) include poems celebrating Maud Gonne’s beauty and his unrequited love. Yeats’s verse grew more colloquial and realistic with every volume. In The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), and The Tower (1928), he evolved a new kind of poetry, taut but graceful in style, enriched by images and symbols from the private, mystical ‘system’ he developed, encouraged by Georgie Hyde-Lees, whom he married in 1917, and set out in his prose-work The Vision (privately printed in 1926). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Later volumes include Words for Music Perhaps (1931), The Winding Stair (1933), A Full Moon in March (1935) and Last Poems (1939).