The Heart of the Writer, companion volume to The Maker of the Omnibus (also reissued in Faber Finds) is a book of fascinating and revealing information about English writers. Where the first book focused on their creativity and the influences which helped to shape them, The Heart of the Writer concentrates on their nature and personality. It offers an extraordinary catalogue of writers' attitudes to parenthood, love and marriage, as well as fame, showing patterns of similarity and contrast, and sometimes unlikely parallels. It also shows the range of ways in which a nation remembers them.

Wonderfully informative and entirely original in concept, and the product of a lifetime of research, this book, like its companion, The Maker of the Omnibus, is an irresistible treasure-trove.