Brief Lives: Twentieth-century Pen Portraits from the "Dictionary of National Biography" Book

Drawn from the archives of the Dictionary of National Biography, this collection of sharply drawn portraits offers a rich cross-section of the men and women who shaped Britain's identity in the twentieth century. The DNB is an unrivalled record of modern British thought and achievement, combining critical insight with lively prose, entertaining anecdotes, and private data. Brief Lives contains many of the best articles from the twentieth-century supplements to the DNB, collected for the first time in a single, affordable volume. Here, writers, artists, and musicians rub shoulders with scientists, industrialists, politicians, and soldiers in a unique and highly readable anthology of national endeavour. With Kingsley Amis on Sir John Betjeman, Michael Kitson on Sir Anthony Blunt, Stephen Spender on W. H. Auden, Ian Gilmour on R. A. Butler, Richard Ellmann on T. S. Eliot, Yehudi Menuhin on Jacqueline du Pre, Alan Bennett on Russell Harty, David Cecil on Virginia Woolf, Philip Ziegler on Wallis Simpson, and more, Brief Lives presents no fewer than 150 fresh and enlightening snapshots of British life and culture in modern times.Read More