The Diaries of a. L. Rowse - Hardcover

Rowse's journals extend over the greater part of the 20th century. He was born in 1903 and died in 1997. The son of a poor, virtually illiterate Cornish china-clay worker he became one of the most prolific authors of his time and one of the most-read. For fifty years a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (its first working-class entrant) he seized the opportunities offered in scholarship, in literature, in politics and above all in public controversy.

Rowse also has a gift of describing country houses and their often eccentric inmates just when the old system was crumbling into dissolution. And yet he is equally alive to New York, to California, to the opulence of great American mansions and to the openness of American universities.