Ronald Blythe, critic and writer, is the author of The Age of Illusion, a social history of England between the wars, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, The View in Winter, From the Headlands and Divine Landscapes. He is editor of Writing in a War (originally published as Components of the Scene), The Penguin Book of Diaries and Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War. Many of these are published by Penguin or Viking. He has edited Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, Henry James's The Awkward Age, and William Hazlitt's Selected Writings for Penguin.