It is an uncommon thing to sit on the Supreme Court or the British throne, to create enduring literature and art or win an Olympic medal.
But despite this ambivalent, unsentimental relationship with the surroundings of his childhood, Peace may have succeeded in creating an enduring literature for a curiously undocumented area of Britain.
As in much of the most enduring literature, it's easy to read our current concerns into Frankenstein – and so to be reminded that they aren't really all that new.
JS Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop Most enduring of literature's "spend, spend, spend" fantasies.
It is the sort of impulse, the sort of uncompromising urge, to get at the truth through language that informs so much of what is excellent and enduring in literature.
An enduring clinical literature suggests that individual vulnerability to stress and subsequent predisposition to develop certain disease states, notably depression, are related at least in part to a history of early environmental adversity.
In the past decade, one of the enduring axioms of literature has been finally, jarringly broken, and that is Dr. Johnson's "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money".
Last week in Questioningly, we questioned two things simultaneously: the enduring appeal of literature (as refracted through the lens of our relaunched books blog, Page-Turner) and the possibly momentary momentum fuelling the Facebook I.P.O.
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are certainly enduring works of literature that display a deep understanding of the American experience around the turn of the century, with its expansive desires and pervasive disillusionments.
But don't rely on the software that processes your office memos to compose enduring works of literature.
Here, M. H. Abrams, the founding general editor, and Stephen Greenblatt, the current general editor, discuss the history of the anthology, the challenges facing English literature survey courses and the enduring question, Why study literature?
