At the end of the Second World War Piers and his younger brother Tom are growing up at Tothill House, the family home with its magnificent baroque hall by Vanbrugh. Tom is the pluckier of the two, because pluck means overcoming one's fears. Piers has no such fears to overcome; he is ambitious. As the post-war years witness a division in their aspirations and their destinies, the two brothers strive to achieve their own means of setting the world on fire. With rich characterization, virtuoso scenes of comedy, and sparkling dialogue, Setting the World On Fire provides a brilliant anatomy of post-war English society from 1948 to 1969. 'It is superb entertainment and social criticism but it is also a poem about the fire in human beings ... A moving and disturbing book and a very superior piece of art.' Anthony Burgess, Observer.
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About the Author
One of Britain's most distinguished novelists Sir Angus Wilson was born in 1913. Educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford he joined the British Museum as a cataloguer before being called for service in 1941. His literary career began with a collection of short-stories published in 1949. These were followed by other short-story collections, novels and plays. Co-founder with Malcolm Bradbury of the MA programme in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Wilson was appointed professor in 1967. Chair of many literary panels, including the Booker prize, and campaigner for homosexual equality he was knighted in 1980. He died in 1991.
--This text refers to the
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Jacket describes story well,
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This review is from: Setting the World (Hardcover)
First, the book's title is actually "Setting the World on Fire."
Second, I thought I would include the description from the jacket, since Amazon does not provide any like information. The jacket reads: "For the brothers Piers and Tom Mosson, whose loving relationship lies at the core of this rich and dramatic novel, their boyhood nicknames, inspired by the two seventeenth-century architects of Tothill House, one of London's great houses, provide the real clue to their natures. Tom, the younger, is called "Pratt" after Sir Roger Pratt who crafted the classical symmetries of the Mossons' ancestral mansion, while Piers is called "Van" after Captain John Vanbrugh who grafted the great baroque hall onto Tothill House. Over the decades following World War II, we see the brothers grow and change but still embody the distinguishing elements of caution and staunch stability, and of dash and mercurial creativity. Reflecting their natures and peopling their lives are those about them, including their errant mother, Rosemary, their staid Uncle Hubert and his outrageous Italian fiancee, Marina, their steely and possessive grandmother, Jackie, and their sporadically and disconcertingly lucid great-grandfather. Even as we come to know these people, in considerable part through Angus Wilson's uncannily apt and scintillating dialogue, we are kept aware of threatening reality, of the fire and ice that ever lie in wait in our fateful age. In this novel of humanity at bay, of the disparate goals towared which human nature can be driven by destiny, and of the snares cast by passion, Angu Wilson gives us an unforgettable tragicomic parable. Like Phaethon painted on the ceiling of the great hall, the brothers--and the rest of us--can elect or not to set the world on fire." ..The jacket description does the story proud.
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