In 1978 Frank Swinnerton published his sixty-first book, Arnold Bennett: A Last Word. Two years earlier, at the age of ninety-two, he published his forty-first novel, Some Achieve Greatness. It is clear that he was one of the most prolific of British...

Readers with a general curiosity about the last twenty-five years of English literature need look no further than ["The Georgian Scene"]. There are, no doubt, more brilliant writers and better critics in England than Mr. Swinnerton, but I doubt if any writer is better informed. It is precisely its information which gives this book its melancholy value—this, and its author's extraordinarily pleasant manners. "Melancholy" because so few of the writers it mentions can ...

It is not clear why Mr. Frank Swinnerton has called his new novel Coquette. A coquette, one had always understood, was a lady who loved the work for its own sake, who found the evocation and frustration of desire a satisfying sport in itself; but his Sally Minto was moved in her first encounter with a man by real passion and in her second by ambition. A novel about a coquette would be primarily … a discussion of the mystery of athleticism, that passion which leads human beings to spend their lives at...

[The Georgian Scene] contains essays on approximately seventy-five writers who range in time from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and in importance from Shaw and Bennett to Edgar Wallace and Noel Coward. A few of the discussions are quite perfunctory, and the space devoted to each often seems to bear little relation to either the popularity or the significance of the subject, but the best are genuinely illuminating and nearly all both informative and readable. Mr. Swinnerton quite frankly discusses his authors f...