Search Results

“... is easiest when X, Y and Z have been written by the same person. You see The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, remember how much you enjoyed Sarah Waters’s other books – it’s a no-brainer. And just in case you’re the kind of person who remembers the titles of novels more easily than the names of ...”

“... Have you ever tried to write a Victorian novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse ...”

“... of those muddy, confused old photographs has come alive and started to talk. The Night Watch is Sarah Waters’s fourth novel, her first to abandon the ‘frissony’, ‘pastiche’, ‘lesbo-Victorian’ theme developed, to great popular and critical success, in Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith ...”

“... other than a normal way for the patriarchs of a respectable middle-class family to behave. Sarah Waters’s novels – the first three set in the Victorian era, the more recent two in the 1940s – have always been interested in the ways in which English society has disposed of its more awkward or inconvenient members by locking them away in ...”

“... or sometimes ‘neo-sensationalism’, whose exponents include A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and Michel Faber. M.E. Braddon’s secrets would make a sensational novel of their own. Brought up and educated by her mother, she was ‘a keen, precocious and eclectic reader’ of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and ...”

“... of a year beginning in late 2013, I found myself at five separate places called the Meeting of the Waters. The first was the confluence of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next ...”

“... thinks, to modernist and postmodern writers from James Joyce to Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. Chapters on the delight Dickens took in names and his use of coincidence demonstrate with equal conviction that technique can be a way of knowing the world.Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations ...”

“... 2015 – she attracts a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along ...”

“... it was an atavistic fear then, and remains so now, despite its locus moving from pestilential waters, or the ‘bad air’ which gives the disease its name, to the bite of an infected anopheles mosquito. In 2009, at a conference in California, Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitoes into the audience. ‘There is no reason,’ he said, ‘only poorer ...”

“... Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the omniscient third-person narrative is interrupted; the novel’s central character is God and Diski lets her deity have a point of view. In extended monologues, God looks down on the world, judging the ‘happy, human family’: ‘What ...”

“... many inferences about aristocracy as we can or wish to. The women are Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, the grandson of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. The main story starts with the birth of Caroline in 1723 and ends with the death of Sarah in 1826. About ...”

“... The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. A roman numeral designates the stanza and initial capitals mark the beginnings of each line; other capitals (litterae notabiliores) highlight and personalise the names of the birds, in contrast to the other nouns, which describe the weather or organic ...”

“... in the second verse of the opening of Genesis. ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Two uses of ‘face’ in one verse, and a third implied face, surely: God’s own, hovering over the face of his still uncreated world. The Almighty, looking into the face of his ...”

“... would have been much greater: but then this novel has already been written – it is called Esther Waters. In its scenic aspects – its depiction of Victorian landscapes and interiors, of social and private life in both England and Italy – the novel is a deep disappointment. It is no good saying that Wilson was an ordinary person and so her fictionalised ...”

“... make lists. In favour of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves ...”