Contains various essays and reviews that W H Auden wrote during the years when he was living in England, and also includes the full versions of his two illustrated travel books, "Letters from Iceland" and "Journey to a War". This book is intended not only for Auden's admirers, but those concerned with twentieth-century literature and culture.

This book contains all the essays and reviews that W. H. Auden wrote during the years when he was living in England, and also includes the full original versions of his two illustrated travel books, Letters from Iceland (written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice) and Journey to a War (written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood). Auden's early prose ranges from extravagant indiscreet travel diaries through sharply observed critiques of writers from John Skelton to Winston Churchill. It includes studies of communism and Christianity; audaciously wide-ranging essays on literature, psychology, and politics; and writings about gossip, sex, prisons, and schools.

"We need Auden again, sacred and profane. As the New Age lunges into the volcano, we could do worse than read the Auden of the `30s, if only to prepare us to understand, and value, the later Audens . . . The Complete Works, edited with elegant scruple by Auden's literary executor Edward Mendelson is . . . the only way to get at Auden as he happened, year by year, bit by bit, and not as he, or his later biographers, want us to think of him."---Tom D'Evelyn, The Boston Book Review