A dazzling collection of occasional writings by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist on subjects ranging from Thermopylae to the English Channel, and from Coral Island to Jules Verne. 'A book of occasional essays which afford us many fascinating insights into Golding the man . . .It is highly individual yet profoundly modest; it has an unusual, slightly angular candour, full of painful knowledge and a beautiful humanity . . . event the slightest piece bears the mark of his rare, austere mind, his remarkable imagination . . . Even these occasional essays are enough to remind us that . . . there is not, at the moment, a writer to touch him.' New Society
Author
People note British writer Sir William Gerald Golding for his dark novels, especially The Lord of the Flies (1954); he won the Nobel Prize of 1983 for literature. People best know this British novelist, poet, and playwright for this novel. Golding spent two years, focusing on sciences, in Oxford but changed his educational emphasis to English, especially Anglo-Saxon, literature. During World War II, he served as part of the royal Navy, which he left five years later. This experience strongly influenced his future novels. Later, he taught and focused on writing. Classical Greek literature, such as that of Euripides, and The Battle of Maldon , an Anglo-Saxon oeuvre of unknown author influenced him. College students in the 1950s and 1960s gave the attention to Lord of the Flies, first novel of Golding; their attention drove that of literary critics. He was awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage , the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. He received knighthood in 1988. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
