The Times Literary Supplement has published an edited version of a lecture given by critic and novelist James Wood celebrating English author Henry Green.

Henry Green (the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke) is remembered for his 1945 novel Loving, his attention to class (especially the working-class), and his mastery of dialogue:

Though one praises a writer for having an “ear” or an “instinct” for speech, it is not realism, as such, that one is praising. Speech, in a writer like Green, is not simply a matter, as creative writing workshops put it, of “getting it right”. Green, like Pritchett, did indeed listen to conversations in pubs and on buses – the realist’s impulse to gather from the world – yet a great deal of his genius lies in how he invented a plausible magic on the page for his speakers.

Read James Wood’s “Henry Green, the Last English Modernist.”