John Batchelor

Published in 1900, Conrad’s Lord Jim can in many ways be seen as the first ‘modern’ novel. This important full study of the book, originally published in 1988, emphasizes the outstanding historical and artistic significance of Conrad’s masterpiece. Meer

Is literary biography so widely read for popular, 'prurient' reasons, or for reputable intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? Meer

H. G. Wells wrote almost a hundred books, yet he is generally remembered for only a handful of them. He is known above all as a writer who heralded the future, yet throughout his life he clung to fixed attitudes from the Victorian past. Meer

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria's favourite poet, commanded a wider readership than any other of his time. This biography shows him as a Romantic as well as a Victorian, exploring both the poems and Tennyson's attempts at play writing, as well as the pressures of his age and the personal relationships that made the man. Meer