In 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot, Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar, and the Beatles were in their prime. This was a changing world, which British and Irish writers both contributed to and reflected in drama, poetry and prose.
The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing tells the story of British and Irish writing from 1963 to the present. From the first performance of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the 1960s to lad novels and Chick Lit in the twenty-first century, the authors guide the reader through the major writers,...

A major reference grammar offering comprehensive coverage of spoken and written English based on real everyday usage. With its clear, two part structure, this is a user-friendly book from the world's leading English grammar publisher. The accompanying CD-ROM (Windows only) makes Cambridge Grammar of English even more accessible with: - The whole book in handy, searchable format. - Audio recordings of all the examples from the book. - Links to the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online for instant definitions of new vocabulary.

This book summarises and makes accessible recent work in corpus research, focusing on spoken data and on the place of lexis in grammar and discourse.

The Penguin Guide to Literature in English: Britain and Ireland provides an illustrated introduction to the work of the most important writers and their historical background from the year 600 to the end of the 20th century. It covers the works of novelists, dramatists, and poets from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Austen to Dickens, James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, right through to modern-day authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Roddy Doyle, and Irvine Welsh. Written specifically for non-native speakers of English, it offers many illustrations and literary extracts as well as glossaries of...