The Penguin Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century

by Kenneth McLeish

Book by McLeish, Kenneth

Genres: Nonfiction

604 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

John Kenneth Tyrrell McLeish, known as Kenneth McLeish was a British writer, playwright and translator. McLeish, "the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain", translated all the surviving classical Greek plays, most plays by Henrik Ibsen and Georges Feydeau, and individual plays by Plautus, Molière, Alfred Jarry, August Strindberg, Ödön von Horváth and Eugène Labiche.

Reviews

[Sammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Kenneth McLeish is phenomenal, a great example of someone passionately well-read, skilled, and willing to share with others. This book is a useful guide to many of the major artistic movements of the 20th century, and I appreciate having it on my shelf. Nevertheless, I'm somewhat ideologically opposed - McLeish is open in the introduction that he has chosen many of the artists based on whether he likes them personally or not, and has omitted fashion, photography, and film as controversially artistic (a judgment no doubt cleared up in the last 30 years) but this leads to some obviously egregious omissions. Caryl Churchill not in the theatre section? Women don't really make the cut here.