Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins, president of England’s Royal Society of Literature and a member of the House of Lords, has written 18 books. His most recent is Churchill: A Biography (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $40). Here, he chooses five favorite titles.

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (Knopf, $64). This, in my view, is the greatest novel ever written—a subtle, satirical, often richly comic survey of human emotions and relationships done against the background of Parisian high society in the 50 years from 1870 to 1920.

Middlemarch by George Eliot (Penguin USA, $10). In the quartet of Victorian novelists who have most strongly survived (Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope), I give Eliot pride of place; Middlemarch, set at the meeting point of old rural England and the towns of the industrial revolution, is her masterpiece.

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The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press, $10). This was the last (and best) of Trollope’s six “political” novels. It is a perfectly matured example of his style and method, and the apotheosis of his chronicles of the unending and fluctuating war between love and property.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Harvest Books, $12). This fairly short 1925 novel is not necessarily the best of Mrs. Woolf’s, who was to fiction something like Wagner had been to music half a century before, but it is for me the most evocative and attractive.

The Sword of Honour Trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown, $12.95–$13.95 each). This trilogy of World War II Britain (at home and abroad) is a splendid national tapestry—even if seen from a somewhat narrow social angle. It is the 20th century’s answer to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.