Robert Barnard is a former Professor of English Literature at the University of Tromso, Norway. He is the author of many crime novels, as well as studies of the work of Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie.

• 1. The Age of Chaucer. 2. Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose.3. The Beginnings of Drama.4. Shakespeare.5. Stuart Drama.6. Poetry - Donne to Milton.7. The Restoration.8. The Eighteenth Century.9. The Rise of the Novel.10. The Birth of Romanticism.11. Romantics and Anti-Romantics.12. The Early Victorian Novelists.13. The Early Victorian Poets.14. The Late Victorians.15. The Birth of Modern Poetry.16. The Birth of the Modern Novel.17. Depression and War.18. Twentieth-Century Drama.19. From the `Fifties to the Nineties'.Index.