Famous literary friendships such as those between H.L. Mencken and James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are examined in this magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate the breadth and depth of friendship in all its human complexity.

George Steiner's accomplishments in criticism, in theory of literature, and in the history of ideas have made him a central figure on the contemporary intellectual scene. He is as widely known for his frequent contributions to the New Yorker and TLS as he is for his many books. In Reading George Steiner, Nathan Scott and Ronald Sharp bring together a group of eminent American and European critics to offer an assessment of Steiner's work.

If, as George Gissing once wrote, to like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, then the essays collected in this volume suggest that literary criticism remains a lively and vigorous endeavour. Written by a broad range of prominent scholars - senior Romanticists as well as younger critics and major poets - the essays offer a fresh reevaluation of the nature and importance of John Keats's achievement. The idealistic aesthetic or humanistic hero admired by earlier generations of readers develops into a much richer, more complex image of the poet. The product of a continuing...