George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, FBA (23 October 1845 – 28 January 1933), was an English critic, literary historian, editor, teacher, and wine connoisseur.

[citation needed] He wrote numerous articles on literary subjects (including Pierre Corneille, Daniel Defoe, Clément Marot, Michel de Montaigne, Jean Racine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire) for the ninth edition (1875–89) of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

For the publisher William Blackwood and Sons, he edited the series of Periods of European Literature, contributing volumes on The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (1897) and The Earlier Renaissance (1901).

[10] In 1925 he arranged for the publication of a lost recipe book by Anne Blencoe, which had been rediscovered in Weston Hall 200 years after her death.

George Orwell calls him a 'confessed reactionary'[12] in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier and cites various extracts from the Scrapbooks which display Saintsbury's class-based disdain for the welfare state and paupers.

Eliot dedicated the publication of his book Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on the Poetry of the 17th Century (1924) to Saintsbury.