PETER PARKER is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos (1987) and biographies of J. R. Ackerley (1989) and Christopher Isherwood (2004). He edited The Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel (1994) and The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Writers (1995), and was an associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).