André Maurois is a famous French writer, member of the French Academy, a classic of French literature of the 20th century. His creative heritage is extensive and multifaceted - psychological novels, short stories, travel essays, historical and literary works, etc. But above all, Maurois is a recognized master of novelized biographies of Dumas, Balzac, Victor Hugo, etc. And therefore the writer’s appeal to the genre of literary portrait - his this kind of mini-biography, a short essay about one of my colleagues in the shop, was not accidental. This book by Maurois is entirely devoted to English literature, the specifics of its development, which resulted in the emergence of such world-famous writers as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw. Maurois, who wrote these essays in the 1920s - the first half of the 1930s, was concerned about the influence of English authors on all European literature, and the fate of the creative heritage of his closest contemporaries - Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, David Herbert Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and others. Many texts are published in Russian for the first time.