I find Longman's Writers and their Work series absolutely invaluable: authoritative criticism given in brief, with an overall assessment built up from focused scrutiny of the major works. Richard Hoggart is just about as authoritative as they come: tutor, lecturer and professor at Hull, Leicester and Birmingham, three cities very important to me. His first book was a study of Auden in 1951 and that led to this distillation and update of his thinking in 1957 (though he revised it a further three times).
I have hitherto found Auden off-putting, but my own researches have shown how significant he was considered when his first volume came out in 1931. He founded a movement which was not really a movement, more a circle with him at the centre, some key like-minded friends who were not necessarily friends of each other, and a whole bunch of imitators. Auden changed, understandably, after he moved to America immediately before the war, and the subsequent work is not my particular interest at the moment. Nevertheless Hoggart's account of it had me gripped.
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