Books by Nigel Dennis

This study sets out to explain the nature of the relationship José Bergamín (1895-1983) had as a critic and prose writer with the major poets of the 1920s and 1930s, and at the same time systematically examines the singularity of his own work as an aphorist, essayist, and dramatist.

'Formerly, he thinks to himself, an artist took real people and transformed them into painted ones: how much finer and more satisfying is the modern method of assuming that people are not real at all, only self-painted, and of proceeding to make them real by giving them new selves based on the best-available theories of human nature...'In Nigel Dennis's 1955 novel - instantly acclaimed as a satirical masterpiece - a long-empty country house is reopened by Captain Mallet, his wife, and his dashing son Beaufort. Their task is to prepare for the annual summer conference of 'The Identity Club': a group of psychologists firmly of the view that people can be instructed as to who they really are and, consequently, persuaded to do well-nigh anything.'I have read no novel published during the last fifteen years with greater pleasure and admiration.' W.H. Auden, 1955'One of the funniest, most intelligent and far-reaching pieces of satire.' Times

'Everyone who now remembers Nigel Dennis thinks that his first novel was Cards of Identity (1955). But in fact he had already written Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (1949)... what I recall liking so much about it was first the story of a young man's emergence from the dark tunnel of his childhood, with the discovery that there are drugs to control the epilepsy that has kept him imprisoned, and then the account of his first glorious summer of freedom... in an unnamed but famously picturesque north European city... What caught my imagination was Dennis's ability both to enjoy the brightness of this little arena of casual pleasure and to go with the waiters and skivvies into the backstage world of dark kitchens and hard labour that frames and sustains it.' Michael Frayn,Guardian