Barry England was born in London in 1932 and educated at Downside. He served as a subaltern in the Far East in the early fifties, then worked as an actor before starting a successful career as a stage and television playwright. His best-known play, Conduct Unbecoming, was a huge success in New York. England's first novel, Figures in a Landscape (1968), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a film by Joseph Losey.
Outstanding ... I doubt if there has been a more impressive debut since William Golding's * Daily Telegraph * Shocked through with dramatic tension * Irish Times * England's prose has the tough, spare elegance of steel scaffolding. His vocabulary is wide, and used with arresting precision. The speed of the narrative is impeccably controlled - long slogs over country, moments of blind panic, passages of demoralizing inactivity, hair-raising evasions, all building up to a central set-piece in a burning field... A brilliant achievement * The Times *