Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit, speaking an apparently unknown language.

"[The author] has here woven the two major parts of Annals of Innocence and Experience together with an equal amount of material which has never been published before. The volume is divided into four parts: The Innocent eye, which formed the first part of the Annals, tells of his boyhood on a farm in Yorkshire. A War Diary consists of long extracts from letters, hitherto unpublished, written during the first World War, from camp and from France, to...

This is one of those rare books whose influence will grow rather than diminish with the years. Icon and Idea is destined to take its place beside Ernst Cassirer's massive and difficult The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a basic work on the original, creative power of the human spirit as it is enacted as culture -- in myth, religion, science, art. Sir Herbert Read's book is neither massive nor difficult. It was first delivered as the Charles Eliot...

Seventeen essays on topics ranging from literary criticism to philosophy.