Author:Samuel Hynes
This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action. In the process a generation discovered itself and found its own expression.
About feelings, fog and forebodings, about the sense of a birth of good against gathering odds, The Auden Generation is wonderfully accurate, never smart or superficial and always sympathetic. A good and necessary book.
—— Geoffrey Grigson , Country LifeHis extremely lucid, readable and intelligent study of the literary history of England in the Thirties greatly enlarges the reader's view of the generation.
—— Stephen Spender , New StatesmanStimulating and authentic... Hynes's judicious choice of example and avoidance of muddying inclusivity, his ability to make critical connections and his clarity of argument, all these qualities give his book unity, give it indeed its definitive scope.
—— John Fuller , The Times Literary SupplementSuperb.
—— Michael Ratcliffe , The TimesA meticulously researched work of scholarship, but is also a delightfully personal account of Dalby's year among the geisha. Geisha remains [Dalby's] best-known work and is the bible of geisha studies to this day
—— Times Literary SupplementPopular history in the best sense...its attention to human detail and its commanding prose call to mind the best work of Barbara Tuchman
—— Washington Post