English Voices

'A sheer delight' Times Literary Supplement Ferdinand Mount has spent many years writing articles, columns and reviews for prestigious magazines, newspapers and journals. Whether reviewing great published works by some of England's finest authors and poets (both alive and dead) including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John le Carré, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Alan Bennett. He also analysed the works of a variety of our Masters covering the past four hundred years such as, of course, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Pepys. Whether it be holding up to account the writings of Winston Churchill, or celebrating the much-loved poems of Siegfried Sassoon, each essay reproduced in full here has been carefully chosen by Mount to weave a unique tapestry of the wealth of writings that have helped shape his own respected career as an author and political commentator. For anyone interested and passionate about writing and poetry across the centuries in the British Isles, this book will be a very welcome guide to the best one can pick up and read.

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist, author of the bestselling memoir Cold Cream, the controversial The New Few and the bestselling The Tears of the Rajas. He lives in London.