Melvyn Bragg has published seventeen novels since 1965, an achievement that would satisfy many writers. He has also published twelve nonfiction books, seven screenplays, and two stage plays. He has edited and contributed to other books and written...

Melvyn Bragg, whose reputation as a novelist was established in the 1960s, has published eleven novels. In the 1970s his career as a Television Arts presenter also bloomed, and he has become a small-scale celebrity. The two careers have interacted...

Remember Me By Melvyn Bragg (Septre, [pounds ]17.99) THE title of Melvyn Bragg's latest novel, Remember Me, is a quotation with a double resonance. Bragg takes as his epigraph lines from Nahum Tate's libretto to Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, in which Dido,...

I bring you today the first extract from the new sex 'n' shipping novel 'Woman Overboard' by Elsie Fairfax, soon to be a major paperback. Part One: A Stranger Comes To Call. Polly had now been at sea for 67 days and...

Speak for England [an oral history of a small market town] has the flat, unpatronizing power of Bragg's Cumbrian novels, such as The Hired Man and A Place In England—and also their undercurrent of anger, even bitterness, against the centuries-old class system that has darkened the lives of his people for so long. Yet the major flaw in this work is that it is too nice, too filial. There are no scoundrels, no black sheep. The author has given us a sincere, unmalicious, and perhaps oversimple tri...

In his novels, Melvyn Bragg has always shown complete disregard for the 'modern' and the 'experimental' in fiction. He writes as if Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Hemingway had never been. In style, structure and content he is closer to the traditional 19th-century novelist than to most of his contemporaries. Like Hardy, he places his characters in a particular rural and small town setting—in his case, Cumberland—and chronicles the tensions and conflicts between differen...

[The Silken Net] is a traditional novel of a particularly English kind. Words could be used linking Melvyn Bragg with Hardy, Lawrence and Bennett in the Grand Chain: that he belongs there is indisputable. The intensity of the writing leads Mr Bragg into occasional linguistic clumsiness. In the interests of grace (if grace interests him) he might have edited himself … more severely…. One could argue about the strengths, the weaknesses and the implications of The Silken Net all night. (p. 229) <...