It is sometimes said that the main contribution of Edith Nesbit to children's literature is that she anchored it firmly in real life. This may seem a surprising claim, given the magical creatures in some of her books, but the concept is comprehensible when we consider the other works that have survived from the first decade of the twentieth century.

Until Nesbit, indeed, the great classics of children's literature were fantasies, as in the wonderful works of Lewis Carroll –as was seen in the recent film of Alice in Wonderland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen were much more memorable than Alice herself.

Carroll, of course, belonged in the nineteenth century, but the first few years of the twentieth century brought forth two other classics which are still considered at the very apex of children's literature. Interestingly, and perhaps understandably, they were both individual works, and nothing else their creators wrote came anywhere near them in either interest or popularity – quite unlike in the cases of the other writers of children's books I have dealt with so far, and those who dominated the scene in the second half of the century too.

The first of these classics was J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which was in fact a play that has been retold and represented in many forms. Most notable of these is its annual reincarnation as the best loved of pantomimes, that strange cultural artifact the British indulge in at Christmas.

In quoting David Cecil about Agatha Christie, it was brought home to me, quite clearly, that I had omitted previously in this series the writer he had noted first as being amongst the most distinguished of his generation. Reflecting on my motive for this, I realized that it was essentially laziness, an unwillingness to read again through a text before I began writing.

For all the writers I had covered previously, memory has been sufficient, supplemented on occasion by reference to a particular work. But in Galsworthy's case, I realized I had forgotten almost everything about his work, save only the highlight of the first novel in his epic series The Forsyte Saga. This was sad, because I remember having been quite impressed with all his works, when I first read him.

That had been at the behest of my great aunt Ida, who much loved the British and had worried in the sixties that I knew nothing of the writers of her youth. Earlier my father, disappointed that my voracious reading was confined to Enid Blyton and C. S. Lewis and suchlike, had drawn attention to my lack of interest in Shakespeare and the Victorians. A determination to prove him wrong soon became a pleasurable obsession, and these then became the staples of my teens – except indeed for Dickens, whose joys I only properly understood nearly a decade later. But in those early years, I had found Galsworthy also fun, reading him from cover to cover in the old Government Agent's Lodge in Kandy, so much so that, a few years later, thinking about my doctoral thesis, I had contemplated a comparison of his epics and those of Trollope.

According to F. R. Leavis, who dominated literary criticism for many years in England, the only modern writer fitting into the great tradition of English fiction was D. H. Lawrence. This view was expressed many years ago, but it was absorbed thoroughly at Cambridge by Lyn Ludowyke, the Professor who dominated the field of English at university in Sri Lanka, and who taught generations of future academics. So, that was the view that stuck in Sri Lanka for many decades with, until relatively recently, all the academics who taught English Literature in our universities, and our Training Colleges too, being products of the even greater tradition associated with that splendid scholar. So, given the practice of sticking to previously studied texts, The Odour of Chrysanthemums' and The Rocking Horse Winner' continue on many syllabuses, as does the poem ‘Snake’, sometimes explained to unsuspecting minds solely in terms of phallic symbolism.

I suspect the open – for that time at least – accounts of sexuality had something to do with Lawrence's exalted reputation in those distant days. This was strengthened in the sixties with some powerful films, stressing aspects of personal relations that were fashionable then, though Lawrence himself seems to have been much less explicit in the first decades of this century, when simple sexuality was circus enough.

Thus, The Fox, a subtle exploration of complex emotional ties between, first, two women living together and then, between one of those women and a young man who joins them (with resulting tensions between the other woman and these two, individually and together),was presented in celluloid as being unmistakably about lesbians.

Deciding to write about P. G. Wodehouse in this series opened up the floodgates in a manner I find immensely pleasurable. Discussing someone whose main contribution, indeed his only one if we accept David Cecil's characterization, was humour suggests a more extensive, or perhaps liberal, interpretation of the parameters of this series. It seemed obvious then that I should also write about the man who, at least according to his Wikipedia entry, wrote more words that have been published than any other writer ever.

I had to have recourse to Wikipedia because, once again, after many years of not reading the man's work, I felt that memory required to be supplemented by research. This was a good thing, because the man I wanted to talk about turned out to be called Charles Hamilton. I had known him as Frank Richards, writer of the Billy Bunter series, and thought that his actual name, rather foolishly, for I knew he was also Hilda Richards, author of books about Billy's sister Bessie.

In fact, he wrote under various names some other series of books about schoolboys too, when this was a well established and popular genre. These books dealt with public schools, what seems a strange British locution for private schools, where boys were sent to become gentlemen, and potential rulers of other breeds, as Kipling termed them, in the Empire.

Rereading books one has enjoyed can be enormous fun. Sadly, due to some sort of residual streak of puritanism, a feeling that one should be getting on with new things, this is not a pleasure I often allow myself.

Fortunately, various factors last week permitted a change of perspective: first, the need to read again a novel by Galsworthy, which turned out most illuminating; second a bad attack of flu, convalescence from which required activity that was not too demanding; finally the decision to bring out a book based on these essays, which endowed preparation for them with the sanctity of productive work. With less to occupy myself with currently than at any time over the last few years, rereading Wodehouse and suchlike seemed then positively a virtue.

Wodehouse, I must admit, was not someone who commanded my devotion, and I had found the Jeeves books, his most famous, repetitive and not especially memorable. Jeeves is the endlessly resourceful manservant of Bertie Wooster, the narrator and principal character of fourteen Wodehouse books. Bertie is a classic upper class twit, with no ambitions and little intellect, but full of loyalty to his friends, chivalry towards ladies, and a healthy appetite for good food and much drink. He first appeared in 1923, and hardly changed in the fifty years that culminated in his last appearance in Aunts aren't Gentlemen.

Few British writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in the period since the Second World War. These include Winston Churchill, probably from sentiment about other achievements rather than actual literary excellence. His various histories, though well written, are not especially ground breaking, certainly not like those of the German Theodore Mommsen, the other historian to win the Prize, for his seminal work on Roman history at the turn of the century. If I recollect right, the only other non-creative writer to win was Bertrand Russel, in his more anarchic phase, so he refused to accept it.

Perhaps the least controversial English winner was Willam Golding, who received it towards the end of a career of half a century. He came to prominence with what is still his best known work, Lord of the Flies, which turns traditional schoolboy adventure stories on their head. The plot involves a group of schoolboys cast ashore on an island after a plane crash, a situation that leads the reader to expect a tale of resourcefulness as they use their intelligence and their skills to survive – as happened in Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson and most notably, without adults, in Coral Island. However, what happens here is much more realistic, as the boys degenerate into savagery.

A few boys manage to cling to civilized values, two of them being punished for this by death at the hands of the herd.

The sixties saw the emergence of a very different sort of novel about spies from those written by Ian Fleming. The writer was David Cornwell, who used the pseudonym John le Carré, since he was working at the time for MI6, the foreign branch of British Intelligence. He had previously been in MI5, which was for intelligence within Britain. This involved countering foreign plotters in the country, which led to le Carré collecting information whilst at Oxford on left-wing groups there, which were thought a threat to national security. Before that, he had taught briefly at Eton, though he had not been a schoolboy there, unlike Fleming, whose credentials as a member of the British establishment were much stronger.

Le Carré's principal hero was George Smiley, the very antithesis of James Bond. He was totally without glamour, and based in part on V. H. H. Green, the rector of Lincoln College in Oxford where le Carré had studied. Wrapped up in Smiley's successes in counter-intelligence are his personal failures, notably a disastrous marriage, with his wife being seduced by a colleague who turns out to be a Russian agent.

The unmasking of that agent was the subject of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy which brought le Carré into British drawing rooms through a brilliant television series, starring Alec Guinness. Earlier, le Carré had won cinematic fame through The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Richard Burton as an idealistic agent who realizes that the Communist he had thought his great enemy was actually a double agent working for the West.

Perhaps the least well known writer I am including in this series is Simon Raven. My view that he should be here is governed by my predilection for sagas, as begun most notably by Anthony Trollope in the nineteenth century, with the Pallisers, his compelling account of political and social and romantic life in the Victorian era, which was turned into a successful television serial in the seventies.

The screenplay was by Simon Raven, who was in the midst then of his Alms for Oblivion series of novels, that covered a selective section of British society after the War. Before that, there had been Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, which dealt with the period around the First World War, and then Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which looked at the generation which grew up before the Second World War, and had to cope with a radically changed world afterwards.

Raven's series achieved nothing like the same stature, perhaps because it dealt with what seemed a very small world. However, the worlds of the other writers of sagas had also been small, it is simply that, with each generation, the influence of that small world had lessened, as society became more diffuse. And, though Raven's characters are more resolutely dissolute than those of his predecessors, I would suggest that he also draws attention to a characteristic phenomenon of the period after the Second World War, not exactly a decline in morals but rather the developing acceptance of the doctrine that anything goes.

I realize that there are only two writers in this series who were born after 1950, and one of them is Vikram Seth, for whom I had to make a special case to show that he could be considered a British writer. The only unquestionably British writer on the list then, in spite of his Japanese origins, is Kazuo Ishiguro.

This is not really special pleading on the part of an Asian because I note that, when in 2008, The Times published a list of the ‘50 greatest British writers since 1945’, Iain Banks was the only such young, unquestionably British, writer of prose, apart from J. K. Rowling. The other two born after 1950, all three in fact in 1954, were Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi. This may have to do with the fact that writers will take time to establish a reputation but, given the early successes of many writers earlier in the century, perhaps one should also wonder whether there is simply less talent around.

Certainly, though I found Banks' first novel, The Wasp Factory, intriguing, I could not think of including him here as being in a league close to the others I have written about. Kureishi I did contemplate, but decided against it. My view was that he had written only one work of unquestionable significance, My Beautiful Laundrette, and that that was not quite in the league of Peter Pan or Waiting for Godot or other individual works that have had a seminal influence.

Amongst the more bizarre talents that emerged in the fifties was Muriel Spark, who will continue to be considered a Scottish writer even though she seems, as decreed by Samuel Johnson two centuries previously, to have decided that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the high road that led him to England. In 1937, she followed her husband to Rhodesia, only to leave him three years later and return to England, to work in intelligence for the rest of the War. She moved to literature afterwards, as editor of the Poetry Review, and published her first novel ten years later, in 1957. Before that, she had become a Catholic, which seems to have been of seminal importance not only for her life, but also for her writing.

Her Catholicism seems to have been sincere, but it did not preclude a healthy cynicism about life and institutions in general. Typical in this regard was her parody of the Watergate affair, the break into Democratic Headquarters during the 1988 Presidential election that led ultimately to President Nixon's resignation, when it became clear that he had known about the act and had contributed to a cover up. A few years afterwards, Muriel Spark published The Abbess of Crewe, about a similar act in a Catholic convent, and the intrigues of the Abbess to cover up the matter.

A new type of schoolboy story emerged after the First War, very different to the public school sort of which Frank Richards was the most famous, if subversive, exponent. The values such books celebrated – in general, if not in the person of Billy Bunter – were those the ruling classes were expected to uphold in the service, in particular, of the British Empire. However, both the Empire and the ruling classes were less supremely in control after the War, and titles such as Play Up, Royals and Our Fellows at St Mark's, redolent of exhortations to a collective to live up to common ideals, had to compete with the different priorities of the emerging middle class. Of course, it may be argued that I am reading too much into different tastes amongst different groups at different periods, but to me, the title of the first book in a series that dominated schoolboy fiction over the half century after the war sums up the very different approach to life that took Britain over during this period.

I refer to Just William, in which Richmal Crompton brought alive in 1922 the irrepressible highly individualistic scamp who ran riot amongst his own family and his village. This was a life closer in background, if not in its frenetic activity, to that of most schoolboy readers, as opposed to the rarefied context of a public school with chaps exclaiming ‘My giddy aunt’ and schoolmasters more at home in Vergil's world than the twentieth century.

Older than Evelyn Waugh by a couple of decades, Virginia Woolfs treatment of a similar social milieu to that of Waugh is markedly different. He wrote of a world in a state of constant transition, whereas her work is an elegy on lifestyles that seemed to slip away almost by accident.

Her principle theme is time, its relentless passing, and the changes it brings in people and in relationships, while attitudes and emotions continue to endure. I have a memory of a book in which she writes how Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday, Tuesday', a memory that stuck in my mind for more than forty years, until I thought to check it before writing this, and found that, in fact, she had written ‘After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows’. The cycle is relentless, our position in it akin to the not quite still, but nevertheless constant centre of a moving world.

Those lines came from The Waves, to my mind a far more effective use of personal narration than Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf deals with six friends, moving from childhood to age, some dropping away, speaking initially in sentences that capture the wonder of new experience – ‘When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,’ said Louis, supposedly based on T. S. Eliot.

Like the lady who married Vikram Seth's great uncle, Ruth Prawer was a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. However, the Indian she married, a Parsi architect, returned to India, so that it was as an Indian that she established herself as a writer. Indeed The Householder, her best known novel before she won the Booker Prize, had an emphatically Indian subject, a young man who takes time to fall in love with the wife to whom he had been married by arrangement.

Much of her work, however, was British in subject matter, if not in outlook. Esmond in India, for instance, is about an Englishman working in India after independence, who nevertheless behaves as though he could get away with anything. He is married to an Indian, but has an English mistress, and also takes advantage of various Indian women to whom his race marks him out as something special. Jhabvala's exposure of a certain type of Englishman abroad, after Empire but with a sense of privilege, parallels Paul Scott's account of the same phenomenon in a brilliant vignette in The Jewel in the Crown.

Jhabvala only really sprang into prominence as a novelist, however, with Heat and Dust, which won her the Booker Prize in 1975. This was a masterly counterpointing of inter-racial affairs between Indian men and English women.

Nearly half a century after Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to another British playwright who was as influential in his way as Beckett. This was Harold Pinter, who came into prominence in 1958 with The Birthday Party, and who continued to produce interesting and important plays over the next half century, though nothing perhaps quite rivaled that powerful critique of all-controlling and pervasive authority. I saw it in the sixties, in one of those exciting British Council tours that covered a range of good British drama, in days too when well established names came on Council tours. The figure I remember was Mona Washbourne, who was brilliant as the landlady who tries to protect her strange and vulnerable lodger.

This odd young man, Stanley, had washed up in her boarding house, with no prior history that she could find out about. She is surprised to find he is of interest to two sinister men who give out gradually that they are officials, sent to check up on him. They demand papers and a history and get less and less tolerant as it transpires that Stanley has no records and no plans. She hopes to settle the tensions by having them at the birthday party she plans to give Stanley, along with a young lady she hopes will be of romantic interest to him, but the event is far from fun.

Moving from Conrad to Henry James, the other writer of the same period whom Leavis fitted into the great tradition, is a leap into another world. The two would seem to have little in common except for their concern with subtle moral choices. One deals with work and duty, the other with conversations. Conrad has the world as his canvas, James the drawing rooms of the Anglo-Saxons. In Conrad, choices can lead to death, in James, they result in sex or its denial.

But despite this, James is undoubtedly one of the greatest of novelists, telling us about the ways in which people relate to each other, how power balances in relationships shift and adjust, how individuals use each other and allow themselves to be used. Sexuality is, obviously, an important element in the gamut of personal relations, and James wrote when women were coming into their own as social authorities too, owners of property, receiving not only education commensurate with that of men, but also sexual education, with such awareness no longer considered improper for virgins.

James is often described as giving centre stage in his novels to young ladies learning about the world, showing us ideal innocence coping through experience with social hypocrisy. Daisy Miller, his finest novella (the short novel James made peculiarly his own), deals with a lively American girl who does not allow herself to be constrained by convention.

It was well after I had finished this series of twentieth century English writers that I was reminded that I had left out one of the most influential. This was Arthur Conan Doyle, and I suppose the reason was that he seemed to me very much a Victorian writer. But though his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, seems every inch a Victorian, ensconced in his bachelor pad in Baker Street, his most memorable adventure as I see it, The Hound of the Baskervilles, was published in 1901. Conan Doyle went on to write many more stories about Sherlock Holmes, before his death in 1930, and also created in the second decade of the new century another character, whom I find as fascinating as Holmes. It makes sense, then, to include him here, as in effect the father of the popular detective novel, with a hero who is certainly much more iconic than his closest challenger, the Belgian Hercule Poirot.

But before I concentrate on the Sherlock Holmes books, I will glance at Professor Challenger, who first saw life in 1912 in The Lost World, a splendid science fiction yarn set in South America, with dinosaurs and pterodactyls and dangerous apes. These are all dealt with firmly by a cast of intrepid adventurers that seemed to epitomize British pluck. Oddly enough, however, one of them was supposed to have been based on Roger Casement, the Irish diplomat and explorer who was later executed for treason during the Irish uprising against the British. Though Conan Doyle broke up his friendship with Casement, he did argue against his execution, on the grounds that he must have been mad.

One of the few pleasures of being unemployed is the opportunity to read. For the last couple of years, I have not really had as much time for books as I would have liked, unlike in the old days when, as an academic, I could read at length and be content that I was doing my duty.

Amongst the books that had piled up unread in recent days was a selection of the letters of Graham Greene which had been given to me for Christmas. He is one of the few novelists writing in the latter part of the twentieth century whom I thought qualified to be considered great. Typically, given my old fashioned predilections, he had actually started writing well before the Second World War, like most of those I admire. However, he continued to create and to comment well into the modern world, and is perhaps the most distinguished literary exponent of the period of the Cold War.

That period of hostility has been characterized in different ways, but essentially the ‘war’ was between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, involving too the allies of both these super-powers. Initially the West, as the US faction was described, saw itself in the period immediately after the Second World War as championing democracy versus authoritarianism, but during the fifties, this also shaded into promoting capitalism versus communism.

A series on twentieth century classics that has concentrated thus far on writers on the colonies would clearly be deficient if it did not deal early on with Rudyard Kipling. He was the first British writer who made his name by writing about India, and is still, I think, one of the most instructive. Of course he began writing in the nineteenth century, and had, in fact, long left India behind as a subject by the time the last century began. Still, he continues to be known best for his Indian writings, the short story collection Plain Tales from the Hills, with which he made his name, The Jungle Book, the strangely wistful poetry, notably ‘The Road to Mandalay’ and ‘Gunga Din’, and of course, his masterpiece, Kim, which is in fact of the new century.

Understandably enough, given the time at which he wrote, he was not an analyst of the colonial experience, as Forster and Scott were, or Joyce Cary for Africa, whom I had to read up hastily when I was asked to teach a course on Colonial Literature when I began working at Peradeniya. The contrast between the presentation of the two situations made clear what Scott enunciated so forcefully, when he talked at the very beginning of The Jewel in the Crown, the first book of the Quartet, of the long embrace between India and Britain,

This book was inspired by the Editor of The Island, Prabath Sahabandu, who suggested, when I found myself unemployed in March 2010, that I contribute a weekly literary column to his newspaper. Since I had resigned from my jobs to become a candidate for Parliament, and would have liked to have been considered a valued political commentator, I was a bit disappointed to find greater value placed on my knowledge of literature. But the task I undertook turned out to be enormously enjoyable, and I must thank him for ensuring that I went back to many books I had enjoyed over the years.

I am grateful too to Yasmine Gooneratne for providing an introduction which says much about the concept behind this book. She makes it clear that agreement on what constitutes a classic is as difficult to achieve, or even envisage, as is agreement on what to include in a list of 50 classics. Indeed I have broadened the definition further, because I set myself the target of identifying not 50 books but rather 50 writers who seemed to me interesting, important and enjoyable. In the process, I considered writers who produced just a single work that was outstanding in these respects, as well as writers who produced no individual work of great distinction, but whose general output fulfilled these requirements.

To my mind the most perceptive observer of British society in the period after the Second World War was Angus Wilson, a writer of enormous skill who has not received the critical recognition he deserves. In addition to writing fiction of great distinction, he was also a perceptive critic and biographer, and his The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling is one of the most illuminating accounts of that complex character. He wrote too about Dickens and the nineteenth century naturalist French writer Emil Zola, which indicates the wide range of his sympathy as well as his knowledge.

He was born in the same year as Orwell, but took a long time to publish, beginning only just after the war with a couple of short story collections. These, The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos, carried sharper versions of the critiques of literary and genteel society that Anthony Powell had already engaged in, in his earlier work.

Wilson's skill in exposing pretensions as well as commanding sympathy for weakness was evident here, but he really came into his own only in 1952 with Hemlock and After, a vivid account of a married homosexual writer dealing with shortcomings in his own personality. The turning point in his understanding of himself comes when he sees a man being arrested for soliciting in Piccadilly, one of his own haunts, and finds himself baying for blood along with the rest of the crowd.