ABSTRACT
This chapter presents concise biographical information of Philip Hensher and analysis of his major works and themes. In the 1990s Hensher published three novels and a collection of short stories which established him as a young writer to watch, a waspishly witty——even cynical—observer of the contemporary scene and of urban manners. All of these books were noted for their ironic, knowing distance from their characters and their icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy In his fourth novel, The Mulberry Empire, published in 2002, Hensher reinvented himself as a historical novelist, creating a large canvas of nineteenthcentury imperialism, albeit one refracted through a prism of irony and pastiche. Hensher was born in London in 1965 and took his first degree at Oxford. He went on to do postgraduate work at Cambridge on eighteenth-century painting before moving back to London to take a job as a clerk in the House of Commons.
