Skip to Content

'The vibrancy of our literature'

6 January 2016

‘As Taylor makes clear, over the past century the exigencies of making a living have never been enough to stop writers and commentators from debating, noisily and disputatiously, about the direction of literature, its distance from popular taste and which self-appointed minority is fit to interpret and pass judgement on it. These are questions that matter to Taylor too because the vibrancy of our literature, summed up in this wide-ranging, entertaining and thoughtful survey, is a marker of our wider cultural health. That such questions mattered always used to be taken for granted and what worries him now is that they no longer are.'

Michael Prodger reviewing D J Taylor's widely-praised The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 in The Times