|
More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
|
William Golding
|
|
(b. 1911, kt 1988) Novelist, much concerned with the nature of evil, who with his first book planted in the nation's mind (and on every school syllabus) a powerful fable on human savagery – *Lord of the Flies (1954). In his subsequent books he has taken many bold leaps of the imagination. His second, The Inheritors (1955), is a story of primitive men and women threatened by a more aggressive *Neanderthal species; Pincher Martin (1956) takes place in the dying moments of a drowning man; and The Spire (1964) follows in intricate detail the stages by which an obsessive medieval architect drives ever higher an over-ambitious cathedral spire.
|
|
|
|
Golding won the Booker Prize with Rites of Passage (1980), in which a young man loses his innocent optimism in the confined environment of a shipload of passengers sailing out to Australia in the early 19C. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1983.
|
|
|
|