John Gross

Gathers witty quotations about nature, religion, fear, hope, fame, wealth, politics, marriage, happiness, knowledge, language, and death

The Oxford Book of Aphorisms

The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford Books of Prose)

In this new edition of his landmark book, John Gross traces the shifting fortunes of the men who shaped literary opinion in England during the Victorian, Edwardian, and contemporary eras. He brings together famous or forgotten critics and editors - prophets, aesthetes, statesmen, dons, radicals, social climbers, idealists, gossipmongers, and literary lions - and explores not only their critical ideas but also their personalities, careers, social backgrounds, and politics. In all a remarkable survey, to which Mr. Gross has now added updates on several literary careers, the new style of critics who have evolved from the universities, and the dominant role of the media. -- from back cover.

Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800

The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters

The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch--though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument. All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favorites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American essayists, from Benjamin Franklin to John Updike and beyond. This is an anthology that opens with wise words about the nature of truth, and closes with a consideration of the novels of Judith Krantz. Some of the other topics discussed in its pages are anger, pleasure, Gandhi, Beau Brummell, wasps, party-going, gangsters, plumbers, Beethoven, potato crisps, the importance of being the right size, and the demolition of Westminster Abbey. It contains some of the most eloquent writing in English, and some of the most entertaining.

The Oxford Book of Essays

Oliver Bowles

Clifford Pinkney Bowie

John Joseph Vincent Forbes

William Waugh Adams

Sidney Hershberg Katz

Daniel Harrington

Arthur Edward Wells

Arno Carl Fieldner

Arthur Warren Ambrose

Charles Edward Munroe

James Ogier Lewis

Eugene Delos Gardner

George Samuel Rice

William Wallace Odell

Spencer Pritchard Howell

Royd Ray Sayers

Harry Earle Tufft

Byron O. Pickard

Nicholas Arthur Clarke Smith

Lionel Herman Duschak

Willard Walker Cutler

Raymond Bardeen Ladoo

John Allen Davis

Martin Joseph Gavin

A. R. Elliott

C. Lorimer Colburn

Carl Alton Allen

Cleve Edwin Kindall

Donald B. Dow

Earl Renwick McMillan

Ernest Woodward Dean

Frederick Gardner Cottrell

Harry H. Hill

Reinhardt Thiessen

Walter Abraham Jacobs

E. W. Dyer

J. E. Crawshaw

L. H. Sharp

Examination of the processes and geological conditions responsible for the widespread erosion of Louisiana's delta-plain coast.

Recent Articles on Petroleum and Allied Substances

A Proposed Standard Sizing Test

This anthology demonstrates to the full how brilliantly the aphorist can illumine the hidden truth, or lay bare the ironies of existence.

James Walter Scott

Precipitation of Gold and Silver from Cyanide Solution on Charcoal

Although this book is a work of fiction, it is based on actual events. John Gross lived through those events. He commanded a mechanized infantry company that fought in Bien Hoa City on the first day of the Tet Offensive. I was one of his soldiers that day. He has an insider's understanding of the Vietnam War, but he also has a wonderful facility for making it understandable to the average reader. David T. Zabecki, Editor, Vietnam Magazine

Jupiter 6

R. S. Dean

Explosive Shattering of Minerals as a Substitute for Crushing Preparatory to Ore Dressing

Twelve authors, from W.B. Yeats to Franz Kafka, and how the TLS reacted to their work on its first appearance, and something of how it has come to be viewed in retrospect.

A TLS Companion

The Modern Movement

A wide-ranging anthology of comic verse including epigrams, street ballads, clerihews, limericks, advertising jingles, as well as the classic writers of comic verse, from Chaucer to Ogden Nash and beyond.

The Oxford Book of Comic Verse

Looks at the influence of Shakespeare's Shylock, describes the character's evolution on the stage, and presents writing about him by Proust, James, T.S. Eliot, and others

A Legend and Its Legacy

Shylock

The Nearly-forgotten 1905 Murder of a Hayfield Policeman

Faithful Unto Death

Kipling is a writer who in many ways lends himself to over-simplification, and he is still no doubt most commonly thought of, not without reason, as a kind of cartoon figure, a handy textbook symbol of the Empire that was. Yet he was in fact far more contradictory and many-sided than either friends or foes generally gave him credit for being during his own lifetime, and if the essays in this collection range widely both in theme and approach, it is in an effort to capture something of his complexity and versatility. The man who emerges may often have chosen to take a bold or even crude line, but it was not through any lack of subtlety in his own make-up; he may have had among his other gifts an almost unequalled talent for coining slogans and catchphrases, but he himself defies any easy formula or summing-up. - Foreword.

The Age of Kipling

No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers as Shakespeare. No writer has attracted such widespread and varied comment. This unique anthology draws on the vast literature that plays little part in formal Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, but that shows with immediacy and passion the enormous impact Shakespeare has had on our cultural life. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented. So are philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, politicians. Shakespearean characters and motifs are shown fuelling the genius of Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickinson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Nabokov and Proust. Shakespeare the man fires the imagination of Kipling and Joyce, Borges and Anthony Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet. R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Ionescu reworks Macbeth.The choice of critical responses is equally wide-ranging. Jean-Paul Sartre proves an unexpectedly expert commentator on King Lear. Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela console themselves with Shakespeare during their imprisonment. And curiosities abound - parodies, burlesques, strange echoes and eccentricities. Throughout the book we can see Shakespeare changing lives, opening up fresh horizons and reaching out to 'the great globe itself'.

An Anthology

After Shakespeare

Traces the development of English and American prose from the end of the Middle Ages to the present through the work of its finest writers, from Sir Thomas Malory to Salman Rushdie

The New Oxford Book of English Prose

A collection of English and American essays on a variety of topics by such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Sir Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf

John Gross

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