Book description
In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by
days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends John Sutherland and
Stephen Fender turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising
and curious artefacts literature has to offer. Why did 16 June 1904
matter so much to James Joyce? Which great literary love affair was
brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963? And why did Roy Campbell
punch Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949? Love, Sex, Death
and Words provides an unrivalled, sumptuous voyage through the highs
and lows of literature's bejewelled past.
John Sutherland is a pre-eminent literary figure - combining
erudition and historical research with a taste for the modern and the
new. He is the recently retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern
English Literature at UCL, a past Chairman of the Booker Prize panel
and the author of one of the standard texts on Victorian fiction.
Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford
and in the UK in Wales and Manchester. He has taught in the States, in
Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, and in England at London and
Sussex, where he was head of American Studies from 1985 to 2003. He
now lives in Dulwich, south London.
