Search Results

“... own (partially obscured) culpability. What is not obscured is her own presence. Sereny may avoid all except the briefest forays into self-criticism, but she is the indisputably dominant character in her own work: the scale and the voice against which all other participants must be measured. Every step of the way, through ...”

“... of the most convincing inclusions in Granta’s list of the 20 best young British novelists, A.L. Kennedy has composed a distinctive voice out of youth and national identity. She was born in Dundee, and now lives in Glasgow; Scottishness informs her fiction. This is partly a matter of a characteristic introspection, the tradition of spiritual autobiography ...”

“... Near the start of A.L. Kennedy’s latest novel, its chief character and overriding consciousness, Nathan Staples, a successful writer of horror fiction, emerges slowly from a bout of compulsive masochistic fantasies, puts Glenn Gould on his CD player, and gets ready to hang himself from an iron hook in the central beam of his cottage, or almost hang himself – well, just enough to give himself ‘that big, blank, hot-mouthing, hair-lifting, sexy, sexy fear that he only ever met at times like this ...”

“... of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such wariness reinforces a sense that these issues are worth ...”

“... Her name is Hannah Luckraft, and she is an alcoholic. Not that the narrator of A.L. Kennedy’s latest novel would ever tell you that herself. This isn’t because she’s in denial about her drinking – much of the time she finds it quite hard to think or talk about anything else – or the damage it causes, but because she isn’t in the habit of stating things so baldly ...”

“... qualities rested on a curious ambiguity that strikes one again and again in the journals of Leo Kennedy, writer of many of its leading articles on European matters from early 1932 to mid-July 1939. Was the Times explaining the mind of the British Government to the world and the British people, or was it explaining the mind of the British people to the ...”

“... created websites that give themselves a plug. But some authors seem nonplussed by the need for all this self-promotion, distrusting the visitors their sites may attract. ‘If you are a lazy and/or unimaginative journalist,’ A.L. Kennedy chaffs on her website, ‘you may consider using the material contained in these ...”

“... generating amazing funds of human warmth, they’d bundled it off into the asylum of history with all the furtive shame of a family of hypocrites dumping Granny in Crackpot Castle.’ As though words alone could extract the concrete spike that architect Sir Basil Spence has ‘driven into the Gorbals’ vitals’, Torrington sets about reanimating the last ...”

“... a lot more time and life-events needing to be sketched in: ageing and illness, loss and offspring. All this is managed with economy and the odd streak of random brilliance. The routine about Rangers supporters and their bank-cards – lifted straight from Porno – was funny anyway, and is even better in its expanded version. But it’s always seemed strange ...”

“... modern church where the Madonna wept tears of blood for the world in the 1990s. Augustine, for all the dark and dismal reverberations of his moral theology, can’t be exiled from the territory of literature: whatever you think of him, his Confessions inaugurate auto-fiction in Europe. Ecstatic anguished visions mark his life, his ferocious changes of ...”

“... place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or community might actually speak through the poet, or co-produce the poetry, may be a primitive ...”