A magnum opus and a cause for celebration from one of the world's foremost literary essayists. Beginning his career at Oxford in the 1950s, the ever-incisive John Bayley has been one of the great bulwarks--in the tradition of William Hazlitt and Edmund Wilson--of twentieth-century world literature. His distinctive sensibility has transformed tastes and theories. Here, in The Power of Delight , a volume that has been assembled with the assistance of New Yorker editor Leo Carey, we see at last the full range of Bayley's life and work, divided into eight sections that include 'English Literature,' 'Russian Novels,' and 'American Poetry.' A wide-ranging guide to essential reading, The Power of Delight examines classics, neglected gems and masterpieces of our time--from Jane Austen to Milan Kundera, Leo Tolstoy to John Ashbery, and from Robert Lowell's messy persona to George Orwell's self-canonization. Born in India in 1925, John Bayley was educated at Eton and Oxford. He became a fellow of New College in 1955, where he taught English. In 1956, he married the novelist Iris Murdoch, who was then teaching philosophy at St. Anne's College. Bayley is an eminent literary critic and the author of Iris and Her Friends and Elegy for Iris . He has since remarried. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and an active supporter of Alzheimer's International, Bayley still lives and writes in Oxford, England.