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Tag Archives: Penguin

E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan”. The Machine Stops pictures a future in which humanity has abandoned the surface of the Earth, grown unable to breath the atmosphere, and moved underground in the so-called Machine: a planetary system of individual cells, each hosting a […]

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Random notes I took shortly after reading the book. The Impossible Cool. Truman Capote. Audrey Hepburn, beyond adjectives. Structure Capote has the best ear for dialogue since maybe Oscar Wilde, and a talent for the off-hand aphorism to match Andy Warhol’s. And please note the cleverness in picking my points of reference. Breakfast at Tiffany’s […]

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

‘A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale’. – Oscar Wilde (being not a proper comment, just notes to be read after the story). I’ve always enjoyed the anecdote that inspired James to write this novella. On January the 10th, 1895, he was hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, at Addington Park (the […]