David Holbrook is a prolific author, mainly of nonfiction. He is probably best known as an educational theorist and particularly as the author of English for the Rejected (1964), which broke new ground through a special concern for the less academically able child. He has also made some impact as a poet, with Imaginings (1960) and five other volumes of verse. It is probably fair to say that without this reputation established in other areas his success as a novelist would have been slight; nevertheless he has, especially in Flesh Wounds (1966), demonstrated that he can write competent fiction.

David Kenneth Holbrook was born in 1923 to Kenneth Redvers and Elsie Grimmer Holbrook. He was brought up in the provincial city of Norwich, the principal urban center of the region of East Anglia, where he attended the boys' grammar school as a scholarship pupil. He was still at school when the war...