The eye-witness accounts in this book have been chosen from hundreds of memoirs, letters and travel books, as well as newspapers. The time span reaches from ancient Greece - Thucydides' account of Athens stricken by plague - to February 1986 when James Fenton in the Phillipines, joins the crowd rampaging through President Marcos's palace. There are disasters, executions and battles - often seen from unaccustomed angles - such as, a French knight's account of Agincourt, El Alamein from a German armoured car. But peace has its dramas too, as seen from the accounts of the Pilgrim fathers setting...

Professor Carey's frontal assault on the principles and practices of literary modernism caused an immediate critical storm, establishing itself as a key text for all future discussion of the subject.

Written by one of the country's most eminent reviewers and academics, this book presents a sceptical and an intelligent assessment of the true value of art.

'Among the wealthy elders, my views gave some offence. Two or three people walked out of my lecture in Hamburg. At a dinner in Oldenburg I was seated next to a senior academic who berated me for my leftist leanings - not what he expected of an Oxford professor...' John Carey, best known for his provocative stance on the arts and the academic establishment, looks back on his journey from an ordinary background to Oxford's oldest literary professorship. Books formed the backbone of his life: from Biggles in his boyhood home to G. K. Chesterton in his West London grammar school to rigorous...

Pure Pleasure gives us fifty of the most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, chosen on a single principle - the pleasure they inspire.