The Times has selected D J Taylor’s The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 as one of its paperback picks of the week:
Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary: âAfter dinner I went to the Savoy Theatre and said, âI am Evelyn Waugh, please give me a seat.â So they did.â Thatâs one of the many stories that can be found in this sweeping history of English literary life. Itâs not heavy-going lit crit but a wide-ranging survey of how writers, publishers and reviewers made a living â and how they were regarded by each other and by the reading public. We learn about the rise of modernism, the taste-setting of the Bloomsberries, the arrival of the 1950s ânew manâ …Â and then the young gunslingers of the 1970s and 1980s …
See earlier posts. It is available in the UK for ÂŁ12.08.