Richards had a far-reaching effect on critical appreciation, and methods of teaching literature. This selection concentrates on his thought, and on his influence on writers and thinkers, rather than his biography, though the letters reveal also his many friendships. The first letter included here dates from the winter of 1911, to his mother; by the early '20s the first of many letters to T.S.Eliot appears; and there are others to Masefield, Empson, Charles Ogden, with whom he founded Basic English, and the painter Wyndham Lewis. The selection covers the whole of his adult life, ending in the year of his death.