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Books

Look! Shakespeare! Wow! George Eliot! Criminy! Jane Austen!

John Sutherland isn't known for subtlety, so use his Little History of Literature as a galloping guidebook

16 November 2013

9:00 AM

16 November 2013

9:00 AM

A Little History of Literature John Sutherland

Yale, pp.275, £14.99

Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island Story and A Brief History of Time and, in content, Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Other notable precursors are How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland, How to be Well Read by John Sutherland, 50 Literature Ideas You Need To Know by John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland and more in that vein.

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