Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent's Park hours in 1944, the ailing H.G. Wells looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. He recalls his unpromising start, and early struggles to acquire an education and make a living as a teacher; his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination and a comic touch; his plunge into socialist politics; his belief in free love and energetic practice of it.
Unfolding this astonishing story, David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who...

'Modern Criticism and Theory' has long been regarded as a necessary collection. This third edition provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think - and live - in the world today.

Adrian Ludlow, a novelist with a distinguished reputation and a book on the A level syllabus, is now seeking obscurity in a cottage beneath the Gatwick flight path. His university friend Sam Sharp, who has become a successful screen writer, drops in on the way to Los Angeles, fuming over a vicious profile of himself by Fanny Tarrant, one of the new breed of Rottweiler interviewers, in a Sunday newspaper. Together they decide to take revenge on the interviewer, though Adrian is risking what he values most: his privacy.

In 2004, Henry James featured as a character in no less than three novels - David Lodge's Author, Author was one of them. With insightful and amusing candour, here he traces the history of his book from conception to publication, pondering the mystery - and indeed the anguish - of so many novels about James appearing at the same time. Lodge's reflections on his own creative practice are accompanied by studies of the genesis, composition and reception of key works by James himself, as well as other novelists from George Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov, and J.M. Coetzee to Graham Greene.

Knížka plná humoru obsahuje výběr limericků, které překvapí nečekanými pointami a rozveselí čtenáře každého věku. Knížku doprovázejí ilustrace plné barev i nápadů Jany Štěpánové.

A collection of essays on writers and writing by the Booker-shortlisted novelist and critic.
Writing about real lives takes various forms, which overlap and may be combined with each other: biography, autobiography, biographical criticism, biographical fiction, memoir, confession, diary.
In these thoughtful and enlightening essays David Lodge considers some particularly interesting examples of life-writing, and contributes several of his own. The subjects include celebrated modern British writers such as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett, and two major...

A memoir from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics.

'I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England...' The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, who got his artistic genes from his musician father and his Catholic faith from his Irish-Belgian mother, David Lodge was four when World War II began and grew to maturity through decades of great social and cultural change, giving him plenty to write about in his distinguished career.
In this memoir of his life up to the publication of...

Once the grandest music-hall south of the river, now its peeling foyer is home to stale popcorn, a depressed manager, and a cast of disparate picture goers who touch and shape each other's destinies. Amongst them is Mark, the cynical intellectual who seeks sensuality and finds spirituality; Clare, his girlfriend, who loses faith and...

Language of Fiction was the first book of criticism by the renowned novelist and critic David Lodge. His uniquely informed perspective - he was already the author of three successful novels at the time of its first publication in 1966 - and lucid exposition meant that the work proved a landmark of literary criticism, not least because it succeeded in communicating a radically new vision of English literature to a readership that reached well beyond the bounds of the academy. Now reissued with a new foreword, this major work from the pen of one of England's finest living writers is...

The first collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics

A nameless man, who has fallen out of love with life, refuses to get out of bed, with unexpected consequences. A sociologist recalls how he learned his first and formative lesson about the oppressive power of capitalism selling newspapers and magazines up and down the platforms of Waterloo station. Some years before the era of the Pill and the Permissive Society, four university friends travel to the Mediterranean for their first holiday together, where the climate is sultry and sex is on everyone s...