If British Nobel prize winning novelists have been few and far between in recent years, the same is not true of dramatists. Actual numbers may be few but, given that dramatists are a comparatively rare breed who rarely win the prize, it is notable that, in addition to Bernard Shaw, two modern British playwrights have been so honoured.

The first of these was Samuel Beckett, though it may be stretching it to call him British. Like Shaw, he was Irish, and he spent most of his working life in France, and wrote much of his work in French. He wrote quite a lot, fiction as well as drama, and some of his later work has received favourable critical attention and is often performed. However, there is little doubt that he would not be remembered at all, except by a few specialist students of literature, were it not for a single work.

I refer to Waiting for Godot, which may well be considered the quintessential artistic expression of twentieth century angst, that useful German word that means so much more than the English word anguish does, conveying as it does a sense of deep social and psychological trauma. Recently, I read a thesis by a former student of mine which set the work solidly in the existential literature of the century, existentialism being the literary philosophy that dominated serious socio-political literary activity in the quarter century after the war.

When I described The Wind in the Willows as about the only book that adults as well as children can read with equal satisfaction, in which the protagonists are animals, I was drawing a contrast mainly with fables. I was implying, perhaps not entirely correctly, that adults would not derive as much satisfaction from fables as children. Conversely, the writer who perhaps made the most effective transition to the world after the Second World War wrote a book involving animals which was emphatically intended for adults. Children reading it, often as a prescribed text, are in effect apprentices in political and social criticism.

I refer to Animal Farm, the allegory about Soviet Communism which George Orwell wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. He was a strange man, and a strange writer, an Etonian with deep resentment of the British ruling class, a socialist accused of claiming that ‘the working classes smell’.

The accusation was by the Daily Worker, the communist party newspaper, and arose from the infighting within the left, following the split between Stalin and Trotsky in the Soviet Union. Orwell experienced this during the Spanish Civil War, when he went out to support the Republican forces, and found their internal rivalries allowed the Fascist forces easy triumphs. He wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia, which was not a success, perhaps because in 1938, the dangers of fascism loomed large, and the problems in Spain were of less importance.

Within a couple of decades after the Second World War ended, there was hardly any celebration of novelists of the inter-war period. As mentioned before, there was a sense that D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce had made seminal contributions, but otherwise, those who had been widely read at the time were treated largely as period pieces.

I should note that this applies only to British fiction, because it was certainly felt that, on the continent, several writers had transformed fiction during those two decades. This applied most obviously to Franz Kafka, but also to less obviously revolutionary figures such as Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust. Unfortunately, I cannot hope to do justice to them in what must be a limited series focusing on English Literature.

I will, therefore, at the risk of seeming parochial, devote a couple of columns to English writers of that period. At the same time, though the novelists I will talk about are not in the league of the great Europeans I have mentioned, I feel that they are at least as interesting as Lawrence and Joyce, perhaps even more so.

My own favourite amongst them is Evelyn Waugh, who was incidentally brought vividly to life in the collection of Graham Greene's letters which sparked off this series of columns. Waugh was also a Catholic convert, and aggressively traditional about it, unlike his more revolutionary friend. But, he was also extremely funny, and well aware of his own foibles.

I have thus far considered writers who dealt obliquely with the social changes that the Second World War brought. There were many of course who explored the subject more directly. To my mind, the one who stands out amongst these was Anthony Powell, and the title of his greatest work, A Dance to the Music of Time, testifies to his purpose in this regard.

The work consists of twelve volumes, which together present a panoramic view of social change over the second and third quarters of the century. At one stage, when I thought my energies limitless, I contemplated a comparative study of this and the similar sagas for earlier generations of Galsworthy and Anthony Trollope. I finally settled down to the much more limited study of Trollope's treatment of women and marriage as compared to that of his own peers, but I have often thought the larger study would be fascinating, in terms of techniques as well as subject matter – including relations between sexes and classes.

Powell wrote four sets of three books, and I had made the mistake of starting in the middle when I was still a schoolboy. The book I first read was Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, one of the second set, which was the least interesting of the four. I then avoided Powell for some time, before starting on the very first book, A Question of Upbringing, which had me hooked.

Having forgotten earlier to write about Bernard Shaw, I suppose it was not surprising that I had forgotten too about Katherine Mansfield. Her principal claim to fame is that she was the first exponent of the short story alone, and she certainly brought the genre much more critical acclaim than it had received previously.

Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand, but spent some years in her teens in England, during which she also traveled on the continent. New Zealand, obviously, proved dull after that, for she came back to England when she was 20, and spent the next and last 15 years of her life there. She married twice and had lots of affairs with people of both sexes, while writing prolifically in spite of much illness that culminated in the tuberculosis from which she died in 1923.

She discovered Anton Chekhov while she was dealing with an unwanted pregnancy in Germany and, influenced by his sharp eyed observation of the extraordinary vulnerability of the ordinary, she developed into a masterful writer. To all intents and purposes, the tone of her work, that of pervasive melancholia, scarcely changed, but her subject matter was varied and usually very moving.

I first came across her work in a collection which was prescribed for study for, I think, the Ordinary Level, forty or more years ago. It was a difficult enough book then, and I was surprised to find some of the stories recurring more than a decade later, for example Lawrence's ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and even Conrad's phenomenally difficult ‘Secret Sharer’.

A writer of a very different sort who, like Orwell, had begun publishing before the Second World War, but was transformed into a major figure as a result of the war, was Enid Blyton. She wrote for children, whereas his work was emphatically for adults; she was an eternal optimist while he had a very gloomy view of human nature and fate.

My belief that the war served to revitalize Blyton too springs from the oddity that her most successful series of books were started during that very dark period for Britain. She had published quite a lot before then, notably the Noddy books which are thought characteristic of her work as a whole by those who have not actually read and loved her. Those books are about Toytown, with the lovable little boy having all sorts of simple adventures. Some of them involve hostility from the Golliwogs, a term now considered racist, while an even more modern sensibility feels grave suspicions about Noddy's relationship with Big Ears, the dwarf who takes Noddy under his wing though it is generally Noddy's own resourcefulness that resolves any problem.

All that is, however, light years away from the works that have continued to command the affection of children as they grow up. I refer here to the various mystery books, where small bands of children overcome criminal activities of various sorts. These range from spying and smuggling and large scale forgery to petty theft and even, in one particularly startling insight into domestic problems, the writing of anonymous letters to fellow servants she wishes to get rid of by a cook called Mrs Moon.

Vikram Seth is arguably an odd writer to figure in this series of outstanding British prose writers of the last century. In the first place, he is Indian and he did not stay on in England after his education, unlike Naipaul, an Indian who grew up in Trinidad, but has since lived in Britain. Whereas Naipaul settled down in England after his undergraduate days at University College in Oxford, Seth (who was at Corpus Christi College) went on to America for graduate studies in economics, did field work in China, and finally returned to India to settle down.

Secondly, while I have not excluded books that deal with the colonies, the others I have looked at are concerned with the colonial or post-colonial experience, and Britishers figure largely as protagonists. Seth's best novel, on the other hand, A Suitable Boy, is emphatically about Indians in the period after independence. So, brilliant though it is, that alone would not have been reason enough to include him here. And then, his first novel, The Golden Gate, was not only set in San Francisco in California, the opposite end of the English speaking spectrum from England, it was also written in verse. Besides, of his major prose works of non-fiction, one is a travelogue about China, and the other an account of his great-uncle and his German Jewish wife.

Still, that couple lived in England and provided a home for Seth during his student days.

Joseph Conrad was born nine years before Kipling, though he too lived well into the twentieth century. Being Polish, with English only his third language, he began writing relatively late in life, and his publications parallel Kipling's in date. There are also parallels as to subject matter, for both wrote about the colonial experience in early life, and then set their later writings in the West.

There are distinct differences too. Kipling wrote about India, and the relatively ordered system of the British, whereas Conrad dealt with South East Asia and Africa and the tremendous scope they offered to loners discovering themselves in the process of dealing at different levels with unfamiliar society and terrain. Then, while Kipling retreated at the end to the domestic joys of Sussex, Conrad explored the world of anarchists and spies in two compelling late novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.

In between, whereas Kipling wrote about Massachusetts cod fishermen in Captains Courageous, probably his weakest work, inspired by his association with his future American wife Carrie, and her brother Wolcott Ballestier, Conrad produced as his American adventure No stromo, perhaps the most masterly of all political novels. Set in a fictional South American republic, developing from the remains of Iberian colonialism, it deals with the enthronement of a new form of colonialism that is concerned primarily with commercial interests. To ensure their perpetuation, possessions can be abandoned, provided a government that is amenable to them is established and reinforced.

Intriguingly, at the same time that Tolkien was teaching at Oxford and writing allegories about good and evil, another English don was doing the same there. This was C. S. Lewis, who created the Narnia series, which is just now receiving its canonization through the medium of film. As with the later Harry Potter series, there are seven books about Narnia, though there the resemblance ends.

The Narnia books travel through time without any system, and have different protagonists. The first book, and I think the best one, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, describes how a family of four children, while on holiday with an old uncle, step through a wardrobe and find themselves in Narnia, a world of talking animals. Sadly, it is now ruled by a wicked witch, who has imposed an age of ice that stifles everyone and everything. The four children lead a revolt, in which they are guided by the lion Aslan, who is an incarnation of God. The parallels with Christianity are taken further when Aslan allows the witch to kill him so that the younger boy Edmund, who had been tempted over to her side, can be released.

Aslan, however, like Jesus Christ, rises from the dead and destroys the witch's forces and enables the elder boy Peter to kill her. The four children then rule in Narnia as kings and queens for many years, until by chance they walk through the wardrobe while out hunting, and find themselves back in this world.

If Enid Blyton's celebration of the English countryside was in addition to her main subjects, it seems to have been the very stuff of J. R. R. Tolkien's increasingly celebrated description of a triumph, also of youthful and innocent forces over wickedness, but of a very different sort. His Trilogy of the Ring became a cult when it was published in the fifties, though I must confess I had not heard of it while at school. At Oxford though, where Tolkien spent much of his life as a Professor of Old English, many undergraduates adored it, and were scornful that I knew nothing of the work. Carried away, however, by other concerns, I only caught up with it when I was back home.

It was a gripping story, in three parts, with a prologue called The Hobbit which introduces Bilbo Baggins, one of the homely race of Hobbits which lived in the shires, clearly meant to evoke England's green and pleasant land. Bilbo had acquired possession of a mysterious ring, which turns out to be the Ring of Power, sought by the evil Sauron to set the seal on his mastery of the world. Standing against him is the wise wizard Gandalf, who convinces Bilbo that the Ring must be destroyed. Unfortunately, it is almost indestructible, and has to be thrown into the fires where it was forged to be got rid of, a task that is undertaken by Bilbo's nephew Frodo.

Before I move back in time to the great figures of the first part of the twentieth century, I would like to discuss here another writer, whom I think one of the very best of those who wrote in the latter part of the century. I refer to Paul Scott, who wrote in the four books of his Raj Quartet the best fictional account of the last days of the British in India, and the attitudes as well as the events that led to partition. His exploration of human interactions in the context of seminal political developments is unmatched in terms of the insights it offers of both the public and the private. I should, however, note that perhaps my appreciation is affected by my interest in the partition of India, which I think is of vital importance to the way history has played itself out, not only in South Asia, but elsewhere too, in terms of the dichotomies that affect international relations as well as analysis now.

However, my approach here will be confined to the simple question of Scott's subject, in the context of the particular historical situation that he wrote about. This is related, however, to other analyses too. For instance, in The Shadow of the Great Game: the Untold Story of India's Partition, Narendra Singh Sarila refers illuminatingly to the relationship between Nehru and Mountbatten, when he writes ‘Nehru and the Mountbattens had come close to each other. The Indian was less able to separate affairs of state from personal feelings than the Englishman’.

I had thought of moving on after Virginia Woolf to the writers of the period after the Second World War, since I would not describe as classic any other writers of the inter–war period, apart from those I have written about. But it occurred to me that this would leave out many memorable works, since, of course, several writers produced individual pieces of great distinction.

Amongst my absolute favourites amongst all books published during this period is I, Claudius by Robert Graves, which I still think the most memorable historical novel ever written in English. It had enormous influence on me that it governed my determination to study classics, and to concentrate heavily on Roman history. I was never particularly good at this, but I have always cherished the comment of the scholar who took my first term of Roman history tutorials, that we got on very well because he was not so much a historian as a dramatist. Sensibly, if sadly, I opted to return to my own college for the rest of the course because I felt I would do little work otherwise. I had had a wonderful summer engaging in fervent discussions of the personal motivations and relationships of the extraordinary characters who dominated Rome during its long revolution, but scholarship seemed to me to require more. Now, having engaged in more study of politics through the ages, and been involved in it to a limited extent myself in Sri Lanka, I realize that Graves' approach was spot on. Understanding people gives one much greater insights into the complexities of politics than political theory does.

Undoubtedly, the most controversial of novelists from the Commonwealth is V. S. Naipaul. For many years, he was deprived of the Nobel Prize, largely it was rumoured because of the opposition of the doyen of Commonwealth literary studies in India, Prof Narasimaiah. This hostility, which I have heard the great man himself express forcefully, arose from the perception that Naipaul replicated the white man's view of India, replete with contempt as much as criticism.

This view was not based on his fiction, which had not dealt with India, but on his travel books, the first two of which had been unremittingly hostile. This approach changed in the third, A Million Mutinies Now, but by then Narasimaiah was not to be placated. Still, the Nobel Committee was, and in 2000, the centenary year of the prize, Naipaul received it, a fitting tribute, in my view, to the most impressive writer of English fiction in recent years.

Naipaul's writing career has spanned over half a century, and it is only in his most recent books that his inspiration has seemed to flag. Before that, he wrote brilliantly, and also managed remarkably to reinvent the subject and the style of his writing twice.

He began as the chronicler of the hybrid society of his native Trinidad, and largely in the comic mode. A number of not especially memorable novels, and several short stories, notably the highly entertaining collection Miguel Street, preceded his first impressive work, A House for Mr Biswas.

Of the novelists who were prominent between the wars, only a couple seemed by the sixties to have been really influential. One was D. H. Lawrence, about whom F. R. Leavis made extravagant claims that continued to be taken very seriously in Sri Lanka for many years. The other was James Joyce, whom Leavis considered comparatively trivial.

His major works were not, therefore, considered essential reading in Sri Lankan universities. So, I was surprised to find how important he was thought to be elsewhere, and indeed also by Leavis, who delivered regular sideswipes at Joyce's fiction in his writings. However, Sri Lankan authorities did regularly prescribe a couple of Joyce's short stories for study at Advanced Level and thereafter, so most students, and teachers too, of language as well as literature, are familiar with ‘Eveline’, and to a lesser extent ‘Araby’.

These are taken from the collection called Dubliners, which seems to me, in fact, to be the most interesting of all Joyce's work. By now, I believe that all, except the most devoted disciples, find Finnegan's Wake, Joyce's last experimental novel, unreadable. That was my impression when I tried it and, unlike with Henry James' The Golden Bowl, I felt no desire to get back to it.

Ulysses, Joyce's most famous work, I did manage to finish, though I think, on balance, it is also largely unreadable. The book was emphatically experimental, post-modern or post-post-modern as the jargon has it, being a modern version of Homer's Odysseus divided into 24 sections as that was.

Perhaps the most unusual of the British writers who achieved classic status in the twentieth century was E. M. Forster. He published no fiction between 1924, when A Passage to India came out, and his death in 1970. Yet his reputation continued to grow, and it did not suffer when one of the principal reasons for his long silence became public after his death, with the publication of what he had in fact written in the interim, namely a novel, Maurice, and several stories with homosexual themes.

This was followed by virtual canonization, with the release of several films that were the high water mark of British nostalgia about its imperial past. The film of A Passage, with a splendid portrayal by Peggy Ashcroft of its strange old heroine Mrs Moore (and a preposterous caricature by Alec Guinness of Prof Godbole, Forster's own bizarre interpretation of spiritual India), joined the television serial based on Scott's Raj Quartet (called with no sense of Scott's sense of irony, The Jewel in the Crown) and Gandhi as essays in romantic nostalgia.

True, they all portrayed ugly aspects of the empire, the bloodshed of partition, the patronizing insensitivity of several representatives of the Raj, but all this was secondary to a sense that really, the vast majority of the British were pretty good chaps, even if it was only the women (Peggy Ashcroft again superb as the sympathetic missionary Barbie Batchelor in The Jewel) who could express what they truly felt. What they suffered from their countrymen when they did this was sanitized out of the picture.

It was only a few years after Peter Pan made his debut on stage that there appeared yet another still celebrated children's book in the mode of fantasy. This was Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, again a singular achievement, though he wrote other books too. He also achieved distinction of another sort, in working for the Bank of England, where he rose to the position of Secretary to the Bank, before retiring under not entirely happy circumstances when he was not yet 50.

The Wind in the Willows, published in the year in which he retired, is a woodland tale, with hardly any humans in it, and none of consequence. The animals who are its heroes are unusual ones, not the lion or fox or deer or squirrels that children could admire or love. Rather, the book begins by introducing Mole and the Rat he befriends, two apparently settled bachelors, who are quite content to potter about doing nothing, ‘simply messing about in boats’, as they put it, so long as they have enough to eat and a comfortable place in which to sleep. But they also make friends with the extravagant Mr Toad, who lives in Toad Hall, and enjoys nothing better than showing off. The only person who might be able to control him is the wise old Badger, and even he is not always successful.

It was astounding that I had forgotten George Bernard Shaw, in writing about classic British prose writers of the twentieth century, and my surprise is compounded by the fact that two erudite friends from whom I invited suggestions did not recommend him either. One of them declared he was an insufferable old bore, but, though I can understand the comment, that is not the whole story, and his achievements were certainly considerable.

It is possible that in my memory, he, or at least his most influential work, belonged to an earlier period, given that both Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant had been published in 1898. However, the essence of a play is production, and only three of the seven plays in the two volumes were produced in the 1890s. Indeed, Mrs Warren's Profession, recognizably the least pleasant of them since it dealt with prostitution, was publicly produced only in 1925, though it had a private performance in 1902.

The plays that Shaw perhaps saw as his most important, Man and Superman and Major Barbara, were published early in the century, while his most popular plays, Pygmalion and Androcles and the Lion, came out in 1912. Shaw was, by then, well into his fifties, but he was still to write St Joan, which turned the story of the brave woman soldier on its head, and also The Millionairess, when he was 80. This was turned into a memorable film with Peter Sellers a couple of decades later, when Pygmalion was also transformed into ‘My Fair Lady’.

The most forceful exponent of what might be termed the public school ethos in literature was, I think, a Scotsman called John Buchan. He had been to a grammar school himself, but Scottish schools of the better sort had long had a more intellectual tradition than English ones. Having gone on to Oxford, Buchan then joined the imperial enterprise in its most stylized form, as a member of what was termed Lord Milner's ‘kindergarten’, the group of young men who worked under Milner and went on themselves to similar exalted positions in the Empire.

Milner, who governed South Africa, surrounded himself with bright young men, generally not aristocrats but those who had graduated through a public school and Oxbridge education into the ruling class. Buchan ended up his most famous product, as a writer who propagated the ethos and also as Governor General of Canada, the office he held when he died. Interestingly enough, he did his best during his tenure to assert a Canadian identity, albeit in the context of the wider British Empire. And he was one of the early proponents of a Scottish Parliament, suggesting that he had understood well that Empire, like the British ruling class, would flourish when it was not restrictive. He was a great proponent of multiculturalism and pluralism, though whether this would have extended to those with skin of a different colour, as Paul Scott was to characterize later the hump that many imperialists could never get over (when the British missionary Edwina Crane realizes, in ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, that Christian ideals of human equality yielded to colour prejudices), is not a question that can be answered readily.

Arguably the strangest writer to be included in this series, since he is not especially celebrated even amongst dedicated fans of his work, is J. G. Ballard. He is sometimes described, though his work hardly fits into that genre, as a writer of science fiction (which may explain the fervor and at the same time the diffidence of his fans, since that genre commands strong loyalties that are somehow held apart from literary discourse in general). In fact, his best known book, The Empire of the Sun, is a traditional novel, based on a seminal episode in his own life, when he spent a couple of years in a Japanese internment camp. This was in Shanghai, where his parents had been working before the Second World War.

It has been argued that the oppression Ballard experienced as a child during this period – he was 13 in 1943, when the Japanese took over the International Settlement in Shanghai, which had hitherto thought it was sacrosanct – contributed to the violence that is endemic to his work. He himself, however, said that, though there was brutality, the children also had fun. Certainly, that book seems to me the least dark of the novels of Ballard that I have read.

In presenting the whole experience emphatically through the eyes of a child, and indeed removing his parents from the action for most of it, Ballard conveys also a sense of the innocence that governs responses to the violence and suffering that have to be endured.