Bøker av Jeremy Mark Robinson

BLADE RUNNER: POCKET MOVIE GUIDE This book is a guide to the 1982 movie made from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick - Blade Runner. A thorough exploration of Blade Runner forms the core of the book, looking at the conception, production, themes, critical reception and influence of the 1982 Warner Brothers movie in every detail. Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982) was a key figure in 20th century science fiction, famous for embracing drugs and the counter-culture in his work. Dick's fiction includes The Man In the High Castle, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Valis, The Divine Invasion, Martian Time-Slip, The Minority Report, and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Dick's themes included perception and reality, drugs, state control, global capitalism, surveillance, and paranoia. On its initial release, Blade Runner grossed $27 million in the United States, placing it no. 16 in that year's box office chart (it was released on June 25, 1982, in 1,290 theatres in the U.S.A.). 1982 was the year, of course, of E.T. The films that came in way behind Steven Spielberg's Universal fantasy were Tootsie at no. 2, An Officer and a Gentleman third, and Rocky 3 in fourth place. Other sci-fi and fantasy flicks in 1982 included Star Trek 2, Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max 2 and The Thing. Blade Runner is often trotted out as another big, important picture that flopped on its theatrical release. That isn't quite true, but it certainly wasn't a hit movie by any standards. The opening weekend was pretty good, but the movie seemed to fade away rapidly after that. Many reviewers and critics came out against Blade Runner on its first release, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, Sheila Benson, and Janet Maslin. 'Muddled', 'gruesome', 'pretentious' and 'overheated' were some of the words used to describe it. Since then, Blade Runner has rightly achieved cult as well as classic status. Its influence on science fiction and sci-fi cinema has been enormous (this book looks at some of the movies inspired by Blade Runner, including Ghost In the Shell, Akira, Brazil and Batman). Fully illustrated. Pocket size. Bibliography, filmography and notes. ISBN 971861714251. www.crmoon.com

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING: POCKET MOVIE GUIDE A pocket guide to the Hollywood adaption of the third part of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy epic book The Lord of the Rings, released in 2003. The book tells you everything you need to know about this popular movie, from writing the script through casting and financing, to shooting and performances, to visual effects, editing and theatrical distribution. The pocket guide includes discussions of every single scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, including the Special Extended Edition (including some key individual shots). There are sections on the all of the important differences between The Lord of the Ring book and the movie adaption of The Return of the King (including numerous details), as well a chapter exploring the additions and the omissions. Looks at behind the scenes stories, and also the critical response to the 2003 picture. There are chapters on the visual effects, on the casting and key personnel of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, on the studio and the financing of the production, on the music and sound, and the marketing and release of the movie in 2003 (including the home entertainment releases on DVD and video). There is also a chapter on the critical assessment of the movie. There is also an appendix on other adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, a detailed filmography, plus info on availability and websites. Jeremy Robinson has written many critical studies, including Steven Spielberg, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, Hayao Miyazaki, Ken Russell, Walerian Borowczyk, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; J.M.W. Turner; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; Arthur Rimbaud; André Gide; John Cowper Powys; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell. Includes bibliography, illustrations, appendices and notes. ISBN 9781861713827. 300 pages. www.crmoon.com

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS: POCKET MOVIE GUIDE A pocket guide to the Hollywood adaption of the second part of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy epic book The Lord of the Rings, released in 2002. The book tells you everything you need to know about this popular movie, from writing the script through casting and financing, to shooting and performances, to visual effects, editing and theatrical distribution. The pocket guide includes discussions of every single scene in The Two Towers, including the Special Extended Edition (including some key individual shots). There are sections on the all of the important differences between The Lord of the Ring book and the movie adaption of The Two Towers (including numerous details), as well a chapter exploring the additions and the omissions. Looks at behind the scenes stories, and also the critical response to the 2002 picture. There are chapters on the visual effects, on the casting and key personnel of The Two Towers, on the studio and the financing of the production, on the music and sound, and the marketing and release of the movie in 2002 (including the home entertainment releases on DVD and video). There is also a chapter on the critical assessment of the movie. There is also an appendix on other adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, a detailed filmography, plus info on availability and websites. Jeremy Robinson has written many critical studies, including Steven Spielberg, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, Hayao Miyazaki, Ken Russell, Walerian Borowczyk, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; J.M.W. Turner; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; Arthur Rimbaud; André Gide; John Cowper Powys; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell. Includes bibliography, illustrations, appendices and notes. ISBN 9781861713810. 292 pages. www.crmoon.com

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING: POCKET MOVIE GUIDE A pocket guide to the Hollywood adaption of the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, released in 2001. The book tells you everything you need to know about this popular film, from writing the script through casting and financing, to shooting and performances, to visual effects, editing and theatrical distribution. The pocket guide includes discussions of every single scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, including the Special Extended Edition (including some key individual shots). There are sections on the all of the important differences between The Lord of the Ring book and the movie adaption of The Fellowship of the Ring (including numerous details), as well a chapter exploring the additions and the omissions. Looks at behind the scenes stories, and also the critical response to the 2001 picture. There are chapters on the visual effects, on the casting and key personnel of The Fellowship of the Ring, on the studio and the financing of the production, on the music and sound, and the marketing and release of the movie in 2001 (including the home entertainment releases on DVD and video). There is also a chapter on the critical response to the movie. There is also an appendix on other adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, a detailed filmography, plus info on availability and websites. Jeremy Robinson has written many critical studies, including Steven Spielberg, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, Hayao Miyazaki, Ken Russell, Walerian Borowczyk, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; J.M.W. Turner; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; Arthur Rimbaud; André Gide; John Cowper Powys; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell. Includes bibliography, illustrations, appendices and notes. ISBN 9781861713803. 292 pages. www.crmoon.com

PETER REDGROVE: HERE COMES THE FLOOD A Study of His Poetry by Jeremy Mark Robinson Poems of honey, wasps and bees; orchards and apples; rivers, seas and tides; storms, rain, weather and clouds; waterworks; labyrinths; amazing perfumes; wet shirts and 'wonder-awakening dresses'; the Cornish landscape (Penzance, Perranporth, Falmouth, Boscastle, the Lizard and Scilly Isles); the sixth sense and 'extra-sensuous perception'; witchcraft; alchemical vessels and laboratories; yoga; menstruation; mines, minerals and stones; sand dunes; mud-baths; mythology; dreaming; vulvas; and lots of sex magic. This book looks at poetry (and prose) from every stage of Peter Redgrove's career, and every book. It includes pieces that have only appeared in small presses and magazines, and in uncollected form. This new edition has been rewritten completely and includes a new introduction and bibliography. Illustrated. British Poets Series. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE, ON POETRY AND LIFE ...this 'strangeness' is 'strange' because reality is so fucking extraordinary, and strange too because most of us try to live without strangeness, and construct something called the 'ordinary' which never existed. Actually, the strangeness is so ordinary as to be quite natural. The strangeness is wonder and what is wondered at is so wonderful that it is strange we do not wonder more. Peter Redgrove, letter to the author (March 5, 1993) Peter Redgrove's poetic code is to create poems which describe or actualize this strangeness of living. The strangeness is here, all around us, he says, but we become immune to it. The poet's task is therefore to refresh body and soul, so that the incredible beauty and strangeness of life is once again experienced. The emphasis is on direct experience, not on abstraction or distance. Redgrove hates the synthetic and artificial. Redgrove's poetic ethic is one of direct touches - the Blakean (and Coleridgean) direct contact stemming from the cleansing of the senses. Peter Redgrove wrote to Jeremy Robinson about this book: Your essay has an infectious enthusiasm, which I'm grateful for, and I especially like the places where you actually grapple with the language of my poems, which is like writing them again. It is a very good piece, which carries the reader with it... Your own approach is irreplaceable because it seems to me founded on your own individuality and personal experience of my poems - which is vastly gratifying... in the majority it is vastly stimulating and insightful. Always, I am grateful to you for your trouble, and your deep response to what I have written.

SEX-MAGIC-POETRY-CORNWALL: THE POEMS OF PETER REDGROVE A new study of the poems of one of Britain's best but underrated poets, Peter Redgrove (1932-2003). This book considers some of Redgrove's wildest and most passionate works, creating a 'flood' of poetry. Philip Hobsbaum called Redgrove 'the great poet of our time', while Angela Carter said: 'Redgrove's language can light up a page.' Redgrove ranks alongside Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He is in every way a major poet. Jeremy Robinson's essay analyzes all of Redgrove's poetic work, including his use of sex magic, natural science, menstrual energy, psychology, myth, alchemy and feminism. This new edition has been completely rewritten. With a bibliography and resources. Illustrated. British Poets Series. Peter Redgrove wrote to Jeremy Robinson about this book: Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall is a very rich essay... It is a very good piece... Your essay has an infectious enthusiasm, which I'm grateful for, and I especially like the places where you actually grapple with the language of my poems, which is like writing them again. It is a very good piece, which carries the reader with it... Your own approach is irreplaceable because it seems to me founded on your own individuality and personal experience of my poems - which is vastly gratifying... in the majority it is vastly stimulating and insightful. Always, I am grateful to you for your trouble, and your deep response to what I have written. I like very much the way you have resurrected poems I had forgotten worked, like the clothes magic-wet and the alchemical honeymoon - I thought they didn't work because nobody had put them in context before of the elemental life that nudges into them always - and I like the cragginess of the prose poems in contrast. Your choice of quotations is excellent throughout, and this is the real point - plus enthusiasm.. it is like a laser gas into which you pump your enthusiastic energy, there is a sudden shift of atomic orbits, and the texts shine with their own weird and natural light!

AMERICAN EROTICA A new collection of erotic short stories set in contemporary America, ranging from the humorous and romantic to the intensely sexual. American Erotica: Erotic Stories features creamy tales of total desire - of men with women, women with women, men with men, and plenty of groups too. Some of the stories are out-and-out fantasy and wildness - such as a day trip into the Californian countryside to find the clitoris in ¿A Complete Guide To the Clitoris, Including Map¿, and an alternative universe where men have gigantic cocks (in a story called - what else? - ¿Big Cocks¿). Some of the stories are domestic and everyday, about couples splitting up and getting back together and doing the wild thing. Husbands and wives, older women and young men, lesbians, gays - and of course ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. Making love in swimming pools, in bathrooms, in tents, on trains, in cars, on vacation in Hawaii, in theaters and a Guns ¿N Roses concert in Philly - these people are getting freaky all over America. Illustrated with erotic nude photographs. EXTRACT FROM 'SUNSET STRIP' 'Hey,' she said and smiled. I'm instantly hyped up to the max, and as aroused as any man can possibly be. That body... those hot, hot eyes, eyes that could slice you up with lasers. 'Wanna walk?' We walked. I had a million questions I wanted to ask her, but you don't interrogate a Goddess. So we talked about the usual shit. About back home, and school, and music, and films, and fuck knows what else. So I put my arm around her, and she - get this - she puts her arm around me. West Hollywood suddenly turned day-glo pink with flights of angels and cherubs fluttering overhead and the sidewalk became marshmallow soft and the buildings were all white and fluffy and the cars turned into cascades of feathers and... She kissed me. She kissed me. Just like that. She kissed me. That hot mouth... a soft, soft tongue... wet lips... playful kisses, like water lapping at the edge of a clear, cool pool in a forest glade with a silver unicorn trotting by in dappled sunlight through golden oak trees... I glanced around. Strange, but we were still on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, in the noisy, bright, crazy, ugly modern world. But when I moved down to brush my lips against hers, and closed my eyes, we were floating on yellow clouds in a turquoise sky with bluebirds twittering around our heads and the sound of laughter and the tinkle of water and the warm breeze from the sea... Lovers, they say, can make a whole world. A whole world. So when Sarah kissed me, and I kissed Sarah, that happened: shock waves like from an atomic bomb spread outwards from us, engulfing L.A. in blastwaves of desire. Outwards into the Pacific Ocean, and up to 'Frisco, and down to Mexico, and across the desert thundered those shock waves of pure love.

JEAN-LUC GODARD There¿s no one else quite like Jean-Luc Godard. You could take a few frames from one of his films and know they were by the maestro and nobody else. Where the flood of movies globally now runs into many thousands, Godard¿s works stand out as original, acerbic, romantic, ironic, humorous and explorative. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 2: ¿GODARD BIOGRAPHY¿ With À Bout du Souffle, Godard produced one of the first, great French New Wave movies, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and written by, among others, François Truffaut. À Bout du Souffle, with its cool Parisian milieu, its filmic and film noir allusions, handheld camera, direct sound, startling editing and stylish, self-conscious performances from Belmondo and Seberg, established Godard as one of the major voices of postwar cinema, a reputation which Godard built on in subsequent early films such as Le Petit Soldat (1960), Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Le Mépris (1963), Bande à Part (1964), and Une Femme Mariée (1964). In these films of the early to mid-1960s, Godard established a radical, polemical series of films as film-essays which confronted issues such as late consumer capitalism, prostitution, labour, politics, ideology, gender, marriage, music, popular culture, Hollywood and not forgetting cinema itself. In the mid-1960s, Godard¿s films became increasingly political - the sci-fi film Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Made in U.S.A (1966), Masculine/ Féminin (1966), 2 ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais (1966) ¿ until, by 1967-68, the Marxist and Maoist influences permeated Godard¿s films: Weekend (1967), La Chinoise (1967), La Gai Savoir (1968), and One Plus One (Sympathy For the Devil, 1968). His concern was ¿not to make political films, but to make films politically¿ (my emphasis). In the 1970s, Godard moved into video and television territory, and worked with Anne-Marie Miéville on many projects: Ici Et Ailleurs (1974), Numéro Deux (1975), Comment Ça Va (1976), Six Fois Deux/ Sur Et Sous La Communication (1976), and France/ Tour/ Détour/ Deux/ Enfants (1977-78). In the late 1970s, Godard made a ¿return¿ to feature filmmaking, with the ¿sublime trilogy¿, Sauve Qui Peut (a.k.a. Every Man For Himself and Slow Motion, 1979), Passion (1982), and Prénom: Carmen (1983). Easily his most controversial film, Je Vous Salue Marie (Hail Mary), appeared in 1985; it was followed by Détective (1985), made to help finance the completion of Hail Mary, King Lear (1987), which starred Peter Sellars, Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen, Nouvelle Vague (1990), Hélas Pour Moi (1993), For Ever Mozart (1997), Éloge de l¿Amour (In Praise of Love, 2000) and Notre Musique (2005). Fully illustrated. Bibliography and notes.

THE SACRED CINEMA OF ANDREI TARKOVSKYBy Jeremy RobinsonA major new study of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), director of seven feature films, including Mirror, Andrei Rublev, Solaris and The Sacrifice. This book explores every aspect of Andrei Tarkovsky's output in the most detailed fashion - including scripts, budget, production, shooting, editing, camera, sound, music, acting, themes, symbols, motifs, and spirituality. Tarkovsky's films are analyzed in depth, with scene-by-scene discussions. This is an important addition to film studies, the most painstaking study of Andrei Tarkovsky's work available. Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most fascinating of filmmakers. He is supremely romantic, an old-fashioned, traditional artist - at home in the company Leonardo da Vinci, Pieter Brueghel, Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoievsky and Byzantine icon painters. Tarkovsky is a magician, no question, but argues for demystification (even while films celebrate mystery). His films are full of magical events, dreams, memory sequences, multiple viewpoints, multiple time zones and bizarre occurrences. As genre films, Andrei Tarkovsky's movies are some of the most accomplished in cinema. As science fiction films, Stalker and Solaris have no superiors, and very few peers. Only the greatest sci-fi films can match them: Metropolis, King Kong, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tarkovsky happily and methodically rewrote the rules of the sci-fi genre: Stalker and Solaris are definitely not routine genre outings. They don't have the monsters, the aliens, the visual effects, the battles, the laser guns, the stunts and action set-pieces of regular science fiction movies. No one could deny that Andrei Rublev is one of the greatest historical films to explore the Middle Ages, up there with The Seventh Seal, El Cid, The Navigator and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Life' trilogy. If you judge Andrei Rublev in terms of historical accuracy, epic spectacle, serious themes, or cinematic poetry, it comes out at the top. Finally, in the religious film genre, The Sacrifice and Nostalghia are among the finest in cinema, the equals of the best of Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Robert Bresson and Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Contains 150 illustrations, of Andrei Tarkovsky's films, Tarkovsky at work, his contemporaries, and his favourite painters. This edition has 23 new pages of illustrations. Bibliography, filmographies and notes. Illustrated. 696pp. www.crmoon.comREVIEW:Robinson's book on the sacred cinema of Tarkovsky is one of the best on the subject. Professor Prakash Kona, English and Foreign Languages University

NUCLEAR WAR IN THE U.K. An exploration of how the United Kingdom would fare in a nuclear war. There are chapters on: nuclear politics ¿ nukespeak and 'nuclear theology' ¿ atomic bomb tests and 'accidents' ¿ American bases in the U.K. ¿ the superpowers' military programmes and strategies ¿ the cost of nuclear war ¿ British civil defence ¿ the Gulf War, 'infowar' and 'smart' technology ¿ nuclear attack scenarios ¿ and anti-war and peace initiatives. Jeremy Robinson's books include Blade Runner and the Films of Philip K. Dick, Rimbaud, Lawrence Durrell and Hayao Miyazaki. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER TWO: ¿HELL ON EARTH¿ A NUCLEAR WAR ¿WORST CASE¿ SCENARIO Here¿s how you might die in a nuclear strike. Maximum capability is about one strategic warhead hitting a target every twenty seconds. Let¿s take a one megaton air-burst scenario. At ground zero, all buildings would be destroyed. Winds of 1,000 mph. There may be an ¿echö of the blast wave (the ¿Mach¿ effect), resulting in double the over-pressure. The fireball will rise at feet/ second, expanding to 6,000 feet diameter after ten seconds. The radioactive cloud would be 3 miles high in 30 seconds. All combustible stuff would ignite, some up to 8 miles away. Air heat rises to 10,000,000° C. Heat travels outwards at 186,000 miles per second. Flesh would melt. People would die in the suffocation from the firestorm. At 1.5 miles from ground zero over-pressure is 30 times than normal atmospheric pressure. From two to five miles away, most buildings would be flattened, within 15 or so seconds. Winds of 130 mph. Clothing would ignite. Radiation sickness is inevitable. At three miles away yoüll feel a flash of light (christened the pika-don at Hiroshima); then intense heat which chars to the bone (full-thickness burns); fifteen seconds later the windows would be blown in by the blast wave; and yoüd be thrown about by the wind. First degree burns as far as 20 miles from detonation. The EMP (electromagnetic pulse) will disrupt computers, telephones, radios, radars and power supplies. Most people would be permanently blinded by the brilliant light. There are about 200 radioactive elements in fall-out. Fall-out is second-stage radiation, contaminating water, the food chain, everything. Everywhere would be a ¿Z Zone¿, a fall-out zone. Nice to know, too, that radiation is undetectable by the five senses. You may have a mortal dose and not know it. Yoüll know soon, though. Yoüre in for a party, with radiation comin¿ at ya in four types: alpha, beta, gamma and neutron. Gamma rays can penetrate several inches of concrete. Uranium and plutonium isotopes are nice, affecting bones, the respiratory tract, the liver, kidneys and lymphnodes: radiation lasts up to thousands of years. Ionizing radiation¿ll give you nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, delirium, exhaustion, haemorrhages, hair loss, ulcers, anaemia and leukemia.

ZERO SUMMER: A NOVEL In Britain of the near-future, a nuclear war is imminent. As society falls to pieces, two people meet and fall intensely in love. This is a powerful erotic and poetic novel, written in a heightened, lyrical style which combines romance with action, beauty and death. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE It was on a Summer's evening that we met. Everything was full of light - the long, sloping light of Mid-West America. But in England. Into this golden light you walked. The seafront was deserted. Soft breezes blew in from the ocean. I had been living for days in the opulence of this water, this rich spice of water, heat, seagulls and wide-open spaces. Water washed our feet as we spoke on the sand. The sun was still hot. You were wearing a cotton Summer dress, white with green spots. I couldn't keep my eyes off you. The day had begun with rain, I remember. Now the sky was turning lilac. In the heat of the day the beaches had been full of tourists and sun-bathers. Now it was teatime and Great Britain shuffled indoors, to eat, to flop down, to watch TV. I was being my usual romantic self, wandering along the shore, enjoying the melancholy emptiness of the sunlit promenade. And you were there.

WESSEX REVISITED: THOMAS HARDY AND JOHN COWPER POWYS Both Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys created a poetic Wessex landscape. Hardy's Wessex has entered popular folklore and myth, and is used in the promotion of holidays, walks, tours, museums, hotels, even town councils. John Cowper Powys's Wessex, explored in A Glastonbury Romance, Wolf Solent, Maiden Castle and Weymouth Sands, among other novels, is less well-known: a place of secret corners, mossy walls, ancient earthworks, Somerset wetlands and ferny hollows. Both writers are discussed thematically for their sense of nature, mythology, philosophy, painting, sensualism, labour, folklore and the family. D.H. Lawrence is referenced throughout as a bridge between Hardy and Powys. Finally Jeremy Robinson considers the film versions of Hardy's novels. This is a valuable addition to the criticism of Hardy and Powys. John Cowper Powys is difficult to categorize. We place him (usually) in amongst D.H. Lawrence, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, William Blake and Thomas Hardy. At first glance, Powys seems to be working in the British nature poetry tradition of William Wordsworth and Edward Thomas. His immediate predecessors are Hardy and Lawrence. In Hardy;s fiction (and Emily Bronte's), one finds that fierce enmeshment of nature mysticism and character. But Powys's novels wholly lack Hardy's narrative drive and feeling for drama and development. From Hardy, however, Powys learnt how to interrelate landscape and psychology in an authentic manner. Whereas Hardy is concerned with the furtherance of the dramatic story, above all, Powys is more interested in the ecstatic states of beingness. In this Powys has much in common with Lawrence. These writers use the details found in nature as vehicles for their characters' feelings. Lawrence uses these musings to open up his text to wider issues of human emotions or politics. In Powys's work, the movement in meditation is inward, downward and backward - into the worlds of history, mythology, and the claustrophobia of the self.

LAWRENCE DURRELL This book studies the works of Lawrence Durrell (February 27, 1912 - November 7, 1990), the great British writer. It explores all of Durrell¿s major works, including The Alexandria Quartet, The Black Book, the poetry, The Avignon Quintet and the Tunc-Nunquam books, many of lesser-known pieces, and reviews all of the Durrell criticism, and Durrell¿s literary friendships (with Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, George Seferis, Richard Aldington, etc). The response that Lawrence Durrell so often generates is negative: critics call him pretentious, baroque, overblown, high-flown, too intellectual, too metaphysical, overwritten, too rich, etc. The Avignon Quintet, his last major work, was received as ¿lush¿, with ¿fantastic characters, opulent landscapes¿, ¿flamboyant... rich, easy style¿, prose that was ¿ringingly evocative¿, ¿an elaborate tapestry¿. For some critics, Durrell¿s books are ¿accurate, moving and intensely readable¿ as a critic wrote of Bitter Lemons, while another critic sees Durrell¿s novels as ¿so beautiful in surface and so uncertain below it¿. It was the 1950s novel Justine that really launched Durrell¿s career, for Justine was a large, complex work that promised much for the following instalments in The Alexandria Quartet. Durrell¿s reputation rests largely on the achievement of The Alexandria Quartet, and it is to the Quartet that critics generally refer when they discuss Durrell. And when Durrell¿s name appears in the index of a book of literary criticism, The Alexandria Quartet is usually being considered. Includes illustrations, a full bibliography and notes.

ANDREA DWORKIN Of this study of her work, Andrea Dworkin wrote: It¿s amazing for me to see my work treated with such passion and respect. There is nothing resembling it in the U.S. in relation to my work. Michael Moorcock wrote of American feminist and writer Andrea Dworkin: ¿I think feminism is the most important political movement of our times. People think Andreäs a man-hater. She gets called a Fascist and a Nazi - particularly by the American left, but it¿s not detectable in her work. To me she seemed like a pussycat¿ She has an extraordinary eloquence, a kind of magic that moves people¿. Dworkin is a very positive writer, always driving onwards for revolution, change and radical thinking. In the introduction to Letters From a War Zone, she writes: ¿I am more reckless now than when I started out because I know what everything costs and it doesn¿t matter. I have paid a lot to write what I believe to be true. On one level, I suffer terribly from the disdain that much of my work has met. On another, deeper level, I don¿t give a fuck¿. Dworkin¿s life¿s work balances the individual suffering of the writer with the larger, worldwide suffering of women¿s subordination, so that, she says, one becomes, on a personal level, immune to pain, while on the larger, global level, the pain of women and children around the world continues to grow, and continues to make her madder and madder: ¿I wrote them [essays and speeches] because I believe in writing, in its power to right wrongs, to change how people see and think, to change how and what people know, to change how and why people act. I wrote them out of the conviction, Quaker in origin, that one must speak truth to power. This is the basic premise in my work as a feminist: activism or writing¿. Here Dworkin posits her work as a crusade, that¿s the newspaper term for her kind of polemic, a ¿crusade¿ against silence and violence, against cruelty and inequality, and certainly Dworkin is often portrayed in the media as a crusader, someone who really believes in herself, in her convictions, someone wholly committed, as few others are, to a radical change. Michael Moorcock, in his piece on Andrea Dworkin (New Statesman, 1988) writes: [w]hat she fights against, in everything she writes and does, is male refusal to acknowledge sexual inequality, male hatred of women, male contempt for women, male power¿.