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Reflections of a working writer and reader

 

 

Posts filed under “quotations”.

Thursday Thoughts: 2

“How do we say No? In the fullness of time, how can we say No?” and “To create is to resist, to resist is to create.” John Berger, from his article The Need to Learn, in Brick 88 . * Whenever I find myself in a situation where I realize my own stance, though heartfelt, [...]

Tuesday Thoughts: 1

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because [...]

Milligan and Murphy – a review

Perhaps this is as good a place as any, as our heroes wend their way towards the future, to describe in some small detail the countryside through which they trudged. If I were to provide you with a simple-to-understand expression to describe where Lissoy was, then ‘in the middle of nowhere’ would be fairly accurate: [...]

New Review for Winged with Death

Winged With Death by John Baker, Flambard Press (2009) ISBN 978-1906601027, 291pp £8.98 ‘It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away.’ The narrator’s account of his decade in Uruguay gets off to a running start. A young man in a remote country is a [...]

Cock and Bull by Will Self

These two postmodern stories from 1993 have remained under my radar until now. Will Self writes irony and challenges gender roles along the way with immaculately timed black humour. The lead character in each of these stories wakes up to something of an anatomical surprise. In the first story, Cock, a woman grows a penis; [...]