A historically informed and informing study guide to of Scott's four great novels of British India - The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils - and of the popular coda, Staying On. The book covers Paul Scott's Life and works, the British Raj, imperial decay, civil and military India, the Indian independence movement, the birth of India and Pakistan, Ghandi, Jinnah, Congress and the Muslim League, the characters of the novel, especially Edwina Crane, Daphne Manners, Ronald Merrick and Hari Kumar.John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (HEB, 2007). He is General Editor of HEB's Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, for which he has written on Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. For Literature Insights he has also written on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Nabokov's Lolita.
