Bøker av Ronald Binns

When it was originally published in 1986, this book was the first full-length study of Farrell's fiction. Ronald Binns provides a comprehensive account of the development of this idiosyncratic Anglo-Irish novelist's career. Farrell's Empire trilogy was one of the most ambitious literary projects of the 20th Century.

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano is now recognized as one of the major novels of the 20th Century, whose breadth and experimental prose have influenced a wide range of contemporary writers. This study, originally published in 1984, considers the significance of the autobiographical elements in Lowry's writing.

George Gascoigne was one of the leading writers of Tudor England - an accomplished poet, a dramatist and novelist. But he was also accused of being a ruffian, a killer, a spy and a "godless person". This major new biography, the first in almost a century, traces Gascoigne's journey from rural Bedfordshire to the Court of Elizabeth I, via Cambridge and the Inns of Court. It follows his career as a soldier in the Low Countries, as an entertainer at Kenilworth Castle during the legendary royal visit of 1575, and as a state intelligence agent. It also examines in detail Gascoigne's premature and mysterious death in Stamford. Apart from his swashbuckling life and his clashes with censorship, Gascoigne had a very modern concept of himself as a writer, viewing the book as simultaneously a cultural and commercial product. Over two centuries before the great romantic poets, he had a towering sense of self. His life and personality was something to be written about and marketed as a thing interesting and important in its own right. This was much more than being simply proud of his ancestry. To be a Gascoigne gave him pride and confidence. But Gascoigne was not interested in promoting himself as the latest bearer of the family coat of arms. He was not a Gascoigne but the Gascoigne: a Gascoigne for all time.

George Orwell first came to live in Southwold in 1921, beginning an association with the town which lasted more than twenty years. He lived at four addresses in the town and this book provides the first full, authoritative account of Orwell's connection with Southwold, its people and the books which he wrote while living there. Using original archival research, Binns reveals new material about the two local women with whom Orwell became infatuated, together with previously unpublished photographs of them. Apart from untangling the complicated chronology of Orwell's association with Southwold, this account examines the impact which the town made upon his writing from his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, to his last, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It also includes a detailed analysis of his satirical account of the town in A Clergyman's Daughter. Orwell in Southwold contains 30 photographs and two maps, showing the local sites important to Orwell both in Southwold and in the surrounding Suffolk countryside.