JOHN SUTHERLAND is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL and has been, for ten years, an annually Visiting Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He has published seventeen books, some 30 editions, many articles in learned journals on a variety of subjects - but mostly concentrating on Victorian fiction, the history of publishing, and twentieth-century literature. His most recent books are: Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (Oxford, 1998), Henry V: War Criminal (with Cedric Watts and Stephen Orgel, Oxford, 1999), The Literary Detective (Oxford, 2000), Last Drink to LA (Short Books, 2001), Reading the Decades (BBC Books, 2002) and Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2004). He also writes a weekly column for the Guardian, and is currently engaged on the Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction.