Retired Professor of Linguistics Desmond Bates is going deaf. It's a bother for his wife who has an enviably successful new career and is too busy to be endlessly repeating herself. Roles are reversed with his aging father, who resents his son's attempts to help him.

Unveils the English character, exploring the underlying class warfare involving three distinct groups - a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property, two independent, cultured sisters, and a young man living on the edge of poverty.

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

Features various articles considering the art of fiction under a range of headings such as 'The Intrusive Author', 'Suspense', and 'Magic Realism'. This book illustrates several styles and techniques by passages from classic or modern fiction. It is suitable for writers, students and those who want to understand how literature works.

'In our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right.' David Lodge This anthology uses extracts from the works of the leading thinkers in the field of literary criticism to introduce the main ideas at the centre of today's literary and cultural debates. Each extract

Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, Author! Author! presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England.

When Phillip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange.

Returning to Florence after 25 years of military service, a man of fifty finds himself haunted by memories of a thwarted love affair which took place on the banks of the Arno during his youth. On enquiring after the erstwhile object of his affections, he encounters a young man in amorous pursuit of her daughter.

Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air, and on the make. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air.

The Rhythm Method is the curse of young Adam Appleby's life and the cause of his children's. While Adam gestates his thesis in the British Museum, his wife worries at home because her period is late and a fourth little bundle of (expensive) joy seems to be on the way, thanks to 'Vatican Roulette'.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism is an anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. The critics collected together in this volume have been drawn from England, America and Europe, and each essay has been prefaced by an editor's introduction.

Agnostic theologian Bernard Walsh has a professional interest in heaven. But when he travels to Hawaii with his father, Jack, it is not in quest of a vacation paradise; it is to visit Jack's dying, estranged sister. The hand of fate and family tensions frustrate the planned reunion, however.

When Vic Wilcox, MD of Pringle's engineering works, meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. But, in time, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds - and about themselves.

Now including a new introduction from the author, this major work from one of England's finest living writers is essential reading for all those who care about the creation and appreciation of literature.

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marriage, a platonic mistress and a flashy car, Laurence 'Tubby' Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst.

Throws light on the dominant literary form of two centuries, in its twin aspects as work of art and commodity. The first part of this book traces the history of the author's novel about Henry James. The essays in the second part pursue the themes of genesis, composition and reception in the work of other novelists.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and their peers were bound to lose their spiritual innocence and their virginities on the way from the 1950s to the '70s. On the one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the permissive society. It was inevitable that things would change radically. But how far could it go?

Lines up David Lodge's trio of comic novels that revolve around the University of Rummidge and the lives of its role-swapping academics. David Lodge exposes the dizzy pursuit of knowledge - literary, commercial, romantic and erotic - with unparalleled wit and insight.

Orphaned at an early age, raised by his aunt and uncle, and apprenticed for seven years to a draper, Artie Kipps is stunned to discover upon reading a newspaper advertisement that he is the grandson of a wealthy gentleman and the inheritor of his fortune.

Concerns with a plot for revenge hatched by two writers, Adrian, a distinguished novelist seeking obscurity in a cottage near Gatwick and Sam, a successful scriptwriter who drops in on his old university friend en route to LA.