James Gordon Farrell's brief career as a novelist was marked by major literary prizes and the praise of contemporary critics, but was cut short by his untimely death. After some slight early works, he found his metier in three major novels which explored in a variety of ways the collapse of the way of life which had built the British Empire. His originality as a historical novelist was balanced by the objectivity and compassion with which he approached his task and by the careful research he conducted into the background of each book. He was helped, however, by his attachment to the old-fashioned world whose decline he sympathetically but faithfully recorded.

Farrell's parents were Anglo-Irish, and, though born in Liverpool, he spent much of his childhood in Ireland. He went to school at Rossall in Lancashire, a conventional English public school which, even after World War II, aimed...