John Murray (Publishers)

ForewordI never turn to Victoria Mather s and Sue Macartney-Snape's Social Stereotypes in the Saturday Telegraph without a creeping anxiety that I might come face to face with myself. It has happened at least five times already: The English Family on Holiday, The Smug Couple from Notting Hill, The...

Editor's Note There is one obvious omission from the poetry selected for this book: I have not quoted from Summoned hy Bells. This blank-verse autobiographical poem is more than a hundred pages long, and is inevitably more relaxed in style than the shorter poems. I have been limited for space,...

ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY has hved in Manchester and London and is now based in his native Lancashire. Starting his literary life as a short-story writer, Hurley published two collections - Cages and The Unusual Death of Julie Christie - before writing The Loney, his first novel. 'I read The Loney...