Tag: England

A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell

Most of us are familiar with Animal Farm and 1984; this story of a clergyman’s daughter living in 1930’s England is far more grim and depressing than any of Orwell’s totalitarian dystopias. Orwell the freethinker sees the Christian life as nothing but unrelieved hypocrisy, cant, and flummery, a way of making you feel like you …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/09/22/a-clergymans-daughter-by-george-orwell/

King John by William Shakespeare

This play is surprisingly good for one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works. It is a story of shifting alliances and treachery in a world that is constantly uncertain. Surprisingly, a character known simply as “the Bastard,” who is surely fictional, is the central and most sympathetic character in the story, proving himself a pole of …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/04/19/king-john-by-william-shakespeare/

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

As a self-serving memoir, I am sure this book was more interesting for Graves to write than it was for me to read. Ostensibly it is a personal account of the Great War, but the author is clearly more interested in himself than in the war. Yet the book is not altogether without interest in …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/04/12/goodbye-to-all-that-by-robert-graves/

Mr Commitment

Mike Gayle is a British novelist. He writes books that, if you were feeling snarky, you might call chick-lit that guys can read too. Less snarkily, he writes light contemporary drama. I’ll admit to a small weakness for the genre, at least in its British variant. Although the plots are wildly predictable, the details of …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/07/18/mr-commitment/