These two books coincidentally form between them a political (and politicized) history of English writing in the twentieth century, but Lee Horsley and Steven Connor write from widely different perspectives and with very different results.

Horsley's volume, to begin with, is misleadingly named. There are passing references to An Inspector Calls and to Stephen Spender's Trial of a Judge, but the only dramatist dealt with at any length is Shaw. Poetry fares even less well-no reference to Eliot, only one each to Yeats and Auden. If, however,'literature'reduces itself, more or less, to prose fiction,'English'seems by contrast to extend its sway with a kind of imperial swagger, effortlessly encompassing Thomas and Klaus Mann, Alexandra Kollontai, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. These writers, to be sure, are relevantly deployed, and Dr Horsley has interesting things to say about them, but it is as well, perhaps, that book-titles are not readily liable under Trades Description legislation.