A History Of English Literature

A whole language’s literary midlife crisis, from Beowulf to “please stop writing about your feelings in quite so much detail,” in one sturdy volume.

A History of English Literature (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973) by Peter Quennell is the grand, sweeping guided tour of everything you were supposed to have read at school but didn’t – plus a lot you were never warned about. Quennell strolls through the centuries like a slightly sardonic headmaster with impeccable taste, pointing out the highlights, the scandals and the occasional tragic misuse of the sonnet.

Inside, you get:

• Old English & Middle English: heroic poems, religious visions and texts that look like someone dropped the alphabet and picked it up wrong.

• The Renaissance: Shakespeare, his colleagues, and an alarming number of people talking in verse about death, honour and unsuitable love.

• The 17th & 18th centuries: metaphysical poets tying theology in knots, satirists shredding society, and novelists quietly inventing binge-reading.

• The Romantics & Victorians: feelings, more feelings, fog, factories, doomed women, railway trains and at least three different kinds of misery in corsets.

• The 20th century (up to 1973): modernism arrives, punctuation is harmed, narrative is questioned, and everyone has at least one nervous breakdown in print.

Quennell does the whole thing in that supremely confident mid-20th-century tone: brisk, learned, occasionally waspish, always ready with a neat judgement like “minor but interesting” (translation: you don’t actually have to read this one). It’s the sort of book that makes you feel more educated just by sitting next to you on the sofa.

This copy comes from Crappy Old Books, loftily graded Condition: Good, which, in our lovingly imprecise taxonomy, means:

• The dust jacket (if present) shows honest shelfwear – edge rubs, small nicks, maybe a faint crease – the literary equivalent of a tweed jacket that’s done a lot of terms and only occasionally been slept in.

• The boards are straight and solid, more structurally sound than several Victorian plots discussed inside.

• The pages are clean, securely bound and gently toned – think “civilised library lighting” rather than “abandoned attic of a haunted vicarage.”

• Expect minor scuffs, softened corners and perhaps a discreet previous owner’s name in the front – these are officially classified as bibliographic patina and come at no extra charge.

ISBN: 0297765779, for the cataloguer who enjoys giving a neat number to eight hundred years of literary angst.

Recommended if:

• You’d like to remember who Dryden was without Googling in front of students or friends.

• You secretly want a single volume that can explain how we got from Chaucer to Joyce without resorting to interpretive dance.

• You enjoy criticism that doesn’t apologise for having opinions and is not afraid to rank your favourites as “minor”.

A History of English Literature: centuries of poems, plays and novels, filed neatly into a narrative that’s part map, part judgement, part gentle gossip – now in respectably timeworn but trustworthy Good condition, ready to sit on your shelf radiating the quiet suggestion that you really have read more than you actually have.

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