Founded by Allen Lane in 1935, Penguin Books soon became the most read publisher in the United Kingdom and was synonymous with the British paperback. Making high quality reading cheaply available to millions, Penguin helped democratise reading. In so doing, Penguin played an important part of the cultural and intellectual life of the English speaking world. For this book, which has its origins in the successful international conference held at Bristol University in 2010 to mark 75 years of Penguin Books, recognised scholars from different fields examine various aspects of Penguin's...

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry 'Beyond the Gentility Principle'. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter.
William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and...