Fashion, Design and Literature

Britain has produced many great designers. Thomas Chippendale designed furniture in the 18th century. Clarice Cliff designed Art Deco ceramics. Sir Terence Conran was a leading 20th-century interior designer.

Leading fashion designers of recent years include Mary Quant, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood.

The UK has a prestigious literary history. Several British writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, including the novelist Sir William Golding, the poet Seamus Heaney, and the playwright Harold Pinter.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, established in 1968, is awarded every year for the best novel. Past winners include Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Julian Barnes. Since 2019 it has been called simply the Booker Prize.

Dame Agatha Christie’s detective stories are read all over the world. Ian Fleming’s books introduced James Bond. In 2003, The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien was voted the country’s best-loved novel.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose books include Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Her novels are concerned with marriage and family relationships, and many have been adapted for television and film.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote many famous novels including Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Characters from his works have entered everyday speech: Scrooge means a mean person, and Mr Micawber describes someone who is always hopeful.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) wrote books still read by adults and children, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an author and poet whose best-known novels focus on rural society, including Far from the Madding Crowd.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish doctor and writer, best known for his stories about Sherlock Holmes, one of the first fictional detectives.

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) wrote satirical novels including Brideshead Revisited. Sir Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was an English novelist and poet; his most well-known novel is Lucky Jim. Graham Greene (1904–1991) wrote novels often influenced by his religious beliefs, including Brighton Rock.

J K Rowling (1965–) wrote the Harry Potter series of children’s books, which have enjoyed huge international success. She now also writes fiction for adults.

British poetry is among the richest in the world. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf tells of its hero’s battles against monsters and is still translated into modern English. Poems from the Middle Ages include Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the years leading up to 1400 about pilgrims who tell each other stories on the way to Canterbury, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, about a knight at the court of King Arthur. The Canterbury Tales was one of the first books printed by William Caxton. Shakespeare wrote many sonnets (poems of 14 lines) and some longer poems.

John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, inspired by his Protestant religious views. William Wordsworth was inspired by nature — his most famous lines begin ’I wander’d lonely as a cloud’. Sir Walter Scott wrote poems and novels inspired by Scotland and its border traditions.

Poetry was very popular in the 19th century. Notable poets include William Blake (‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright’), John Keats, Lord Byron (‘She walks in beauty, like the night’), Percy Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Robert Browning wrote Home Thoughts from Abroad (’Oh, to be in England now that April’s there’).

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were inspired to write about their experiences in the First World War. Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth begins ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’.

Some of the best-known poets are buried or commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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