news, views & reviews
Posted in Action/Adventure, Classics on Mar 5th, 2008
by Anthony Hope
Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda is a classic swashbuckler in the fun-loving tradition of Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, Scaramouche). The book’s enduring success has led to several stage and screen adaptations, including a popular version from 1937 starring Ronald Colman.
It’s easy to see why Prisoner has captured so many imaginations. Hope, in highly […]
Posted in Classics on Jan 13th, 2008
reviewed by John Murphy
François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and recipient of France’s Legion d’honneur, was among the last century’s most pre-eminent men of letters, and a devout Roman Catholic. Vipers’ Tangle is one of Mauriac’s most famous works, a book of bruising beauty that explores man’s capacity for love and hate, bitterness […]
Posted in Classics, Literary Criticism on Dec 2nd, 2007
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, has recently authored a book called Classics for Pleasure, about the abiding joy of reading “duh classics,” as Tony Curtis would say. Included in Dirda’s book is an essay on G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which G.K. fans should be pleased-as-punch about. In […]
Posted in Classics on Oct 13th, 2007
By Joseph Conrad
reviewed by Rachel Murphy
In the fictional South American Republic of Costaguana, the small town of Sulaco is sheltered from the rest of the state by mountain and plain—near the edge of the sombre Gulfo Plácido whose still waters are protected from the ocean gusts—“as if within an enormous semicircular and unroofed temple open […]
Posted in Classics, Comedy/Satire on Oct 1st, 2007
By P.G. Wodehouse
reviewed by John Murphy
If laughter is indeed the best medicine, then the collected works of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) should be prescribed by doctors as a matter of course. It is literally impossible to be downhearted while reading the words of Wodehouse. Believe me, I’ve tried, but then that incomparable fathead, Bertram Wooster, […]