#christopher-ellis

#christopher-ellis

"Why did you do that, sweetheart?" encapsulates the central theme of Blue Heron, as Sasha's actions prompt her parents to question the unpredictable behavior of her half-brother Jeremy.

"We've just seen too much awful stuff, and it's impossible to ironize. The only sane response to that is to kind of sober up and say, 'All right, what resources do humans still have?'"

Every time we read one now, I'm suddenly back in my attic room in Swansea 40 years ago, watching my dad turn the same pages.

In some way, description is violation. Does beauty forgive everything? If we make something beautiful enough, does that mean you get a free pass? I don't know. I hope so.

Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6. Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6's counterespionage arm, blinked. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion.

Morris was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist, and yet she accepted a CBE, showcasing her complex identity.

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits' end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession.

Unlike the agents created by writers such as Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Graham Greene - characters who moved in the upper echelons of the intelligence field - the nameless protagonist of Mr. Deighton's early spy novels was a working-class man who indulged in insolence and wisecracks as he set out to pull defectors from behind the Iron Curtain, root out moles and thwart criminal madmen.

Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker's 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say die, preferring euphemisms such as pass away.

The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.

As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity.

This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.