Howard Spring – författare

In a celebrated essay, Macaulay sums up Bacon''s career as a "chequered spectacle of so much glory and so much shame."The words may fitly enough be applied not only to Bacon''s life but to most men''s lives and to most large experiments of human action.In 1942 I began to write a novel whose purpose was to trace the course of one such experiment from its beginnings in the eighties of last century up to our present time. I intended to call this novel, which would have been very long, So Much Glory: So Much Shame.It seemed to me as time went on that the war years, with the paper shortage, were not the best for the publication of so long a book as I had in mind. And, too, my writing during the war is so sporadic and occasional that progress was slow, and it might be years before the book as I conceived it (or at any rate as my conception worked out in practice) was finished.Things being thus, I decided that it would be better to publish the book piecemeal. In my plan, it was divided into three parts called Hard Facts, Dunkerley''s and The Banner. The first of these is the present volume, which makes, I think, a rounded and self-sufficient story. I hope that, in due course, the other volumes will do so, too; and that finally it may be possible to publish the three as one book bearing the title originally chosen for it.

What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down... I don''t remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out. This is the powerful story of two hard-driven men – one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful Irish entrepreneur – and of their sons, in whom are invested all their fathers'' hopes and ambitions. Oliver Essex and Rory O''Riorden grow up as friends, but in the years after the Great War their fathers'' lofty plans have unexpected consequences.

What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down... I don't remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out. This is the powerful story of two hard-driven men – one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful Irish entrepreneur – and of their sons, in whom are invested all their fathers' hopes and ambitions. Oliver Essex and Rory O'Riorden grow up as friends, but in the years after the Great War their fathers' lofty plans have unexpected consequences.

When they buried the Old Warrior there was only one small wreath to go on the coffin... John Hamer Shawcross never forgot that moment. Hamer Shawcross is born into a poor but aspirational working-class family in Manchester. Studious and hard-working, he becomes a socialist activist, goes into politics and rises to becomes part of the privileged upper classes he began by opposing. Hamer''s trajectory is mirrored by the rise of the Labour movement in Britain from the mid-19th century to the 1930s. This wonderfully perceptive study of a career politician serves as a telling elegy for the Labour Party.