John boynton priestley

1894—1984

A novelist, playwright, critic and broadcaster, he was born in Bradford and educated locally and, after infantry service during World War I, at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He wrote over 60 books and more than 40 plays. His wide-ranging interest in England and the English character, and his appeal to 'the man in the street', made him one of the most popular 'middlebrow' authors of his day.

His early publications include The Chapman of Rhymes (1918) and Brief Diversions (occasional pieces for The Cambridge Review, 1922). Papers from Lilliput also appeared in 1922, the year in which he became a journalist in London. During the 1920s Priestley wrote several volumes of criticism, including studies of Meredith (1926) and Peacock (1927), and several novels. His first popular success was The Good Companions (1929), a high-spirited novel about three people who, at crises in their lives, join a concert party and start wandering about the country. It was written in the best traditions of English humour of which Dickens served a model.

Priestley became the most popular writer in England after World War II. Postscripts (1940), Britain Speaks (1940) and All England Listened (1968) are selections from his popular wartime broadcasts. His series of radio reports during the war and his belief that the victory over fascism would bring changes for the better in the social life of England made him very popular in the country. Priestley's radical position found its reflection in his novels Daylight on Saturday (1943) and Three Men in New Suits (1945). Their heroes who came back from the front do not want to continue their old life and are expecting progressive social changes.

Priestley was also a philosopher and his life-long interest in Time stimulated his book Man and Time (1964) in which he studies the category of Time. In his novel of 1965 Lost Empires he experiments with Time and tries to juxtapose real and symbolic levels in a story about theatres (empires) and the cinema. Depicted in the novel, the Bohemian life of actors and the whole society before World War I and in the 1960s reveals in the words of the main personage Uncle Nick: 'we are all going down to the swamp'. The allegoric novel is filled with realistic understanding of modern history

Evelyn (arthur st john) waugh

1902—1966

A famous novelist, one of the best 20th-century masters of satire, Waugh was deeply interested in the dialectics of human character and is famous not only as a master of grotesque, mock novel, but also as a connoisseur of man's soul and a master of psychologic prose. Both in his satirical and psychologic works he revealed his devotion to Realism. In his political views he was a follower of the Catholic idea and a fighter against war.

A juvenile piece, The World to Come: A Poem in Three Cantos (1916), was followed by PRB: An Essay on The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1847-1854 (1926), both of which were privately printed. Decline and Fall, his first great success, based on his teaching experience, was published in 1928. He travelled extensively throughout the 1930s and produced several travel books. Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930) was followed by Remote People (about Africa; 1931), Ninety-Two Days (about South America; 1934), Waugh in Abyssinia (about Mussolini's invasion; 1936) and Robbery under Law: The Mexican Object Lesson, published in 1939. His last travel book was A Tourist in Africa (1960).

His main work Decline and Fall (Упадок и разрушение) satirizes the English system of education and many layers of the society: aristocrats, the military, the clergy. The main conflict of the novel lies in the antithesis of a candid inexperienced person — Paul Pennyfeather with an absurd reality of English life shown through grotesque characters and ridiculous situations.