English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments

by Ferdinand Mount

‘A sheer delight’ Times Literary Supplement Ferdinand Mount has spent many years writing articles, columns and reviews for prestigious magazines, newspapers and journals. Whether reviewing great published works by some of England's finest authors and poets (both alive and dead) including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John le Carré, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Alan Bennett. He also analysed the works of a variety of our Masters covering the past four hundred years such as, of course, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Pepys. Whether it be holding up to account the writings of Winston Churchill, or celebrating the much-loved poems of Siegfried Sassoon, each essay reproduced in full here has been carefully chosen by Mount to weave a unique tapestry of the wealth of writings that have helped shape his own respected career as an author and political commentator. For anyone interested and passionate about writing and poetry across the centuries in the British Isles, this book will be a very welcome guide to the best one can pick up and read.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

512 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 5, 2016

About the author

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist and author of, most recently, the bestselling memoir Cold Cream. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Derek Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and stylishly written collection of essays (primarily book reviews). Mount is a master of the short form - and a highly penetrating literary critic. His dissection of Virginia Woolf, for example, is spot on.

[Delphine · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the blurb, English voices is advertised as a selection of portraits of England's finest authors, politicians and clergymen. However, the portraits are not an introduction to those figures: they appeared as literary reviews in the London review of books and the Spectator and offer their view on recently published biographies. It is, in other words, a metaview of a metaview, with all its limitations: density, many oblique references and reliant on immense foreknowledge on the part of the reader.

With the exception of the chapters on the clergymen and the Victorians, I enjoyed most of the portraits. Mount shies away from the classic reverence for Virginia Woolf and W.G. Sebald: he exposes Sebald as banal, and refers to Woolf's style as 'pseudo-poetic slipstream': right on! I discovered some wonderful characters (scientist prof. Derek Jackson, novelist George Gissing, regional writer Nikolaus Pevsner) that I will definitely look into.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sort of book I don't read often enough these days: a collection of extended book reviews and essays, mostly from The Spectator and London Review of Books. Subjects range widely: 20th century Angry Young Men; Classic writers; architecture (of which I know less than little); political figures from the distant and recent past.

It's a good, vigorous work-out, a forced widening of the horizons beyond easy current entertainment or political name-calling. The tone's balanced, judicious, knowledgeable and - irrespective of whether all the judgements are correct or ones with which I agree - an invitation to engage seriously with serious subjects.

A fine piece of work.

[David Mundy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and fluent short essays on a wide range of mostly literary and political figures.

[Judith Bailey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed dipping in and out of this book.