Book excerpt: I: English literature. The genius of Shandy Hall : Laurence Sterne ; Double life : Jane Austen ; Best and worst : Charles Dickens ; Living with Trollope : Anthony Trollope ; Eminent Victorian : George Eliot ; The two Hardys : Thomas Hardy ; The King's trumpeter : Rudyard Kipling ; Life in the head : John Cowper Powys ; Nothing nasty in the woodshed : P.G. Wodehouse ; Like ink and milk : D.H. Lawrence ; Baby face : William Gerhardie ; The last Puritan : George Orwell ; Mr. Toad : Evelyn Waugh ; God's Greene : Graham Greene -- II: The English poets. Family man : William Wordsworth ; Unmisgiving : John Keats ; The all-star Victorian : Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; An art of self-discovery : Edward Thomas ; Fun while it lasted : Rupert Brooke ; Gallant pastiche : Cecil Day Lewis ; The best of Betjeman : John Betjeman ; The flight of the disenchanter : W.H. Auden ; The last romantic : Philip Larkin -- III: Mother Russia. Cutting it short : Alexander Pushkin ; Under the overcoat : Nikolai Gogol ; The strengths of his passivity : Ivan Turgenev ; An excellent man : Anton Chekhov ; The backward look : Ivan Bunin ; Poems with a heroine : Anna Akhmatova ; A poet's tragedy : Marina Tsvetaeva ; On the horse parsnip : Boris Pasternak ; The hard hitter : Isaac Babel ; A prig of genius : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- IV: American poetry. Songs of a furtive self : Walt Whitman ; Mothermonsters and fatherfigures : E.E. Cummings ; Lowellship : Robert Lowell ; "One life, one writing" : James Merrill ; Richly flows contingency : John Ashbery -- V: Out of Eastern Europe. The power of delight : Bruno Schulz ; Something childish : Witold Gombrowicz ; Poet of holy dread : Paul Celan ; The art of austerity : Zbigniew Herbert ; Return of the native : Czeslaw Milosz -- VI: Aspects of novels. The point of novels ; Gossip in fiction ; Little green crabs : Marcel Proust ; The order of battle at Trafalgar ; In which we serve : Patrick O'Brian ; Seer of the ego : Stendhal ; What will you do to keep the s