
A. N. Wilson
(1950– ),novelist, biographer, and reviewer, born in Stone, Staffordshire, and educated at New College, Oxford. After abandoning training for the priesthood he became a teacher and then returned to ...

A. S. Byatt
(1936– )Novelist and critic, born in Sheffield, and educated at the Mount School, York, and Newnham College, Cambridge. Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun (1964), describes a woman attempting ...

Alfred Ernest Teale
(1900–82)A. E. Teale was born in Keighley on 1 November 1900 and died there on 25 February 1982. He was educated at the University of Leeds, where he obtained ...

Basil George Mitchell
(1917–)Basil Mitchell was born in Bath on 9 April 1917, son of George William Mitchell and Mary Mitchell. He married Margaret Eleanor Collin in 1950 and they have four ...

Black Prince
(1973), a novel by Iris Murdoch, narrated by Bradley Pearson, a middle-aged novelist who has been sentenced for murdering a more productive rival, Arnold Baffin.

Booker Prize
A literary prize awarded annually for a novel published by a British or Commonwealth citizen during the previous year, financed by the multinational company Booker McConnell. Now known as the Man ...

broadcasting
1. Communicating to a mass audience.2. Transmitting by radio or television. A method of distribution for television and radio signals via a network of a few powerful radio transmitters that operate ...

Bryan Magee
(1930–)Bryan Magee was born on 12 April 1930 of working-class parents in Hoxton. During World War II he served in the Army Intelligence Corp. After demobilization he obtained a ...

Christine Brooke-Rose
(1926–2012),novelist and critic, born in Geneva, brought up in Brussels, London, and Liverpool, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and University College London. She was professor of English ...

Elias Canetti
(1905–1994)Bulgarian-born writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.Born in Rutschuk, Bulgaria, into a community of Sephardi Jews, Canetti was educated in Zurich and Frankfurt and ...

existentialism
A philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe
(1919–2000)English philosopher. Educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read classics and philosophy (Greats), Anscombe graduated in 1941, in which year she married the philosopher P. T. ...

Gifford Lectures
A series of lectures delivered in Scottish universities under the foundation of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford (1820–87), for promoting and diffusing the knowledge of God and the foundation of ethics. ...

Good and Right
The question on which principle morality should be founded is a crucial one in ethics. The most usual answer in British philosophy has been ‘on the good’, with achievement of ...

James Griffin
(1933– ).Moral philosopher best known for work on well-being, interpersonal comparison of well-being, and consequentialism. His first book was Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism (Oxford, 1964). In ...

John Bayley
(1925– ),novelist and critic, and during 1975–92 Warton Professor of English Literature in Oxford. He married Iris Murdoch in 1956, and wrote an account of their relationship and her suffering from ...

Red and the Green
(1965), a novel by Iris Murdoch. Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, it contrasts the British officer Andrew Chase-White and his Anglo-Irish family with the Republicans Pat and Cathal ...

Sea, The Sea, The
(1978), a novel by Iris Murdoch purporting to be the memoirs or diary of Charles Arrowby, a theatrical director who has retired to a coastal village where he discovers his ...

Simon Raven
(1927–2001),novelist, educated at King's College, Cambridge. In 1957 he resigned his infantry commission to become a professional writer and reviewer. His first novel, The Feathers of Death (1959), ...

Tempest
A romantic drama by Shakespeare performed and probably written in 1611, printed in the First Folio (1623). Although there are contemporary accounts of the shipwreck of the Sea‐Venture in 1609 and ...