Barry Webb – författare

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) ranks among the most prodigious literary talents of Britain in the twentieth century. As a poet, he was best known for Undertones of War, a moving account of the First World War by one of its youngest soldier poets. But he was also a biographer, an edition, a scholar, teacher, and professor in Hong Kong, Japan, and Oxford. This book—the first biography of Blunden and written with the cooperation of his family—captures the man, his full career, and the literary environment in which he lived.  Drawing from many thousands of Blunden's letters, diaries, and other personal papers round the world, as well as from interviews with friends and colleagues, Barry Webb traces the writer's boyhood in Kent, his two years in the trenches of the Somme and Passchendaele, and the career that extended from journalism in postwar London to the chair of poetry at Oxford in 1966. Blunden was the author of over a thousand poems, more than three thousand articles and reviews, and biographies of Shelley and Leigh Hunt, and he was the first major editor of John Clare and Wilfred Owen. Webb describes this active literary life and provides an account of Blunden's many influential friendships (with Siegfried Sassoon, for example), of his three marriages and seven children, and of the intriguing relationship with his Japanese secretary. He reveals Blunden to be a man of many contradictions: usually pictured as most at home on an English village green, he spent half his working life in the Far East; essentially a pacifist, he was the proud owner of the Military Cross; known for his generous mildness, he was accused of Nazi sympathies in 1939; at heart a private man, he was constantly in demand as a leader. Webb sees these tensions as providing the stimulus for the work and writing of a highly respected figure in twentieth-century literature, a man who had a profound effect on contemporaries in both the East and the West.

In R.C. Hutchinson, Barry Webb reclaims the legacy of a highly-acclaimed, yet often forgotten writer. Despite having been awarded the Sunday Times Gold medal for fiction, the W.H.Smith award for the best novelist of the year, being short-listed for the Booker Prize, and several of his 17 novels becoming best-sellers in the UK and America, Hutchinson has not withstood the test of time compared to his contemporaries. Combining Hutchinson's own reflections with insightful critical analysis, Webb traces Hutchinson's thoughtful, observational life alongside his extraordinary literary output. He draws out how Hutchinson's firmly held Christian beliefs allowed him to eschew didacticism for nuanced reflections on the nature of human suffering.Part biography, part critical study, R.C. Hutchinson sheds light on this influential and gifted writer, contextualising his work and highlighting his genius. He was described by Sebastian Faulks as a novelist 'on the grand scale' and 'a mid-century master of the genre', and by Cecil Day Lewis as 'one of the very few living novelists who will be read fifty - even a hundred years hence'. Webb offers readers the opportunity to re-discover this exceptional writer.

In R.C. Hutchinson, Barry Webb reclaims the legacy of a highly-acclaimed, yet often forgotten writer. Despite having been awarded the Sunday Times Gold medal for fiction, the W.H.Smith award for the best novelist of the year, being short-listed for the Booker Prize, and several of his 17 novels becoming best-sellers in the UK and America, Hutchinson has not withstood the test of time compared to his contemporaries. Combining Hutchinson's own reflections with insightful critical analysis, Webb traces Hutchinson's thoughtful, observational life alongside his extraordinary literary output. He draws out how Hutchinson's firmly held Christian beliefs allowed him to eschew didacticism for nuanced reflections on the nature of human suffering.Part biography, part critical study, R.C. Hutchinson sheds light on this influential and gifted writer, contextualising his work and highlighting his genius. He was described by Sebastian Faulks as a novelist 'on the grand scale' and 'a mid-century master of the genre', and by Cecil Day Lewis as 'one of the very few living novelists who will be read fifty - even a hundred years hence'. Webb offers readers the opportunity to re-discover this exceptional writer.

The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther. These five Old Testament books, traditionally known simply as The Scrolls, are among the most neglected parts of the Christian Bible. Each raises particular difficulties with regard to how it relates to the rest of Scripture, and the manner in which it should be understood and used as the Word of God for us today. In Judaism, these books were adopted as lectionary readings for five of the major festivals - but no comparable solution has emerged in Christianity.Barry Webb explores Christian interpretation of these problematic writings. Each book is allowed to set its own agenda, and is then examined in relation to the wider Old Testament context and to the New Testament gospel with its basic structure of promise and fulfilment. In this way, Dr Webb offers fresh and illuminating perspectives on these 'festival garments' of love, kindness, suffering, vexation and deliverance.

Zechariah the prophet's preaching was driven by the conviction that God's kingdom would come, and his will be done, whatever obstacles human beings might put in his way. Living in the small province of Yehud in the sixth century BC, Zechariah was thoroughly engaged with the realities of his own day, but never overwhelmed by them. He knew that life was to be lived in the light of the coming day when there would be 'one LORD, and his name the only name' and when this God would be 'king over the whole earth' (Zech. 14:9).This unwavering conviction gives the book of Zechariah its special character and unifies its diverse visions and oracles. Barry Webb's masterful and perceptive exposition challenges us to make Zechariah's conviction our own and focuses our longing for God's kingdom on the person of Jesus the Messiah.The Bible Speaks Today series covers every book of the Old and New Testaments, as well as Bible themes that run through the whole of Scripture. These revised editions are redesigned inside and out and have been sensitively updated with contemporary language and Bible translations to help you follow, study and teach the Bible in today's world.