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This thesis by Charles Darwin is a curio for me. It begins quite casually observing emotions relating to humans and animals, especially dogs, cats, horses, and monkeys. It then focusses on humankind as the premise for the rest of the observation. Darwin references heavily on other works and adds smatterings of his own family experiences, as well as accounts from friends in distant places. At one point it seems Charles is quite fascinated with the brow (corrugator) to a point where his bemusement is ticklish and later on with his chapter on blushing seems particularly keen on reporting incidents of women baring their bosoms. "This case is interesting, as the blush did not thus extend downwards until it became intense by her attention being drawn to this part of her person."

It's written more from a kind of early David Attenborough style, blending the personal with the scientific but not backed up with much experiential scientific theory. It is extensive in its approach and he covers a great deal of emotions, the detail of describing these is certainly comprehensive, and well worth the read from a purely cursory anthropological point of view.

Darwin is no psychologist but he does attempt to reason such actions and expressions to the best of his knowledge and ability at the time. There are a few amusing anecdotes, one I particularly enjoyed was the image of Darwin retching while attempting to clean skeletons which were not sufficiently macerated.

Another wonderful anecdote relates to one of his children which he fed a ripe cherry ... “When a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth. This was shown by the lips and whole mouth assuming a shape which allowed the contents to run or fall quickly out; the tongue being likewise protruded. These movements were accompanied by a little shudder. It was all the more comical ..." I have done this to all my sons when they were infants, but with a slice of lemon and the effect is extremely comical.

The book is of its time, so if you are sensitive to archaic lexicon used to describe peoples, you may have to put that sensitivity aside. "In Tierra de Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty."

As mentioned in the beginning of my review, this book remains for me a curio of science rather than a compendium of sound knowledge.

The blurb on the back cover is a poor summary to the unusual slice of post-atomic life Dick has served up as a snapshot of dystopian life. There are mutants, but not in the ubiquitous way contemporary fantastic science-fiction and urban fantasy tend to saturate their stories with. And the mutations are more considered and implicit as part of the narrative convention as opposed to characterisation or some sort of "super/magic power". Dick has been selective on the mutant/human ratio for greater affect. Like most of Dick's writing, he has the unrivalled talent of marrying offbeat nuances within the most mundane of circumstances. The story is a snapshot of several communities during the aftermath of an atomic accident. It's an easy, relaxing read with only a slight authorial parable at the end but mostly it focuses on how people interact with each other under the circumstances of having to put their society back together again. Amusingly, Dick concentrates on eye-wear, cigarettes, alcohol, and vermin traps. He manages to create a claustrophobic world without too much intensity and if highfalutin sci-fi puts you off, you won't find it in this novel. Dick writes with a penetrable, if at times unfathomable, penmanship that achieves a bizarre sort of synergy.

The blurb on the back cover is a poor summary to the unusual slice of post-atomic life Dick has served up as a snapshot of dystopian life. There are mutants, but not in the ubiquitous way contemporary fantastic science-fiction and urban fantasy tend to saturate their stories with. And the mutations are more considered and implicit as part of the narrative convention as opposed to characterisation or some sort of "super/magic power". Dick has been selective on the mutant/human ratio for greater affect. Like most of Dick's writing, he has the unrivalled talent of marrying offbeat nuances within the most mundane of circumstances. The story is a snapshot of several communities during the aftermath of an atomic accident. It's an easy, relaxing read with only a slight authorial parable at the end but mostly it focuses on how people interact with each other under the circumstances of having to put their society back together again. Amusingly, Dick concentrates on eye-wear, cigarettes, alcohol, and vermin traps. He manages to create a claustrophobic world without too much intensity and if highfalutin sci-fi puts you off, you won't find it in this novel. Dick writes with a penetrable, if at times unfathomable, penmanship that achieves a bizarre sort of synergy.

"The more one tries to analyze oneself the more one is conscious of amazing paradoxes and inconsistencies which lurk under the simplest surface." And so J.C.P does exactly that. He launches into a confessional that is rampantly earnest but at the same time shrewdly conscious. Dictionary to hand, I enjoyed every drop of his flurry. This book was to involve all five brothers but ended up being just John and Llewlyn. The latter producing a diarist piece that was more reflective and less probing. Llewlyn states in his introduction that he felt a "confession" was more akin to airing one's sins. Both men were liberally open-minded for their time and it is no wonder that John was a writer's writer, inspiring many a new wave of literally rebel. I can mark the effectiveness of a book by the amount of book tags I place in the pages and in this book, I marked thirteen. It is a cursory read and whatever is missing in the text makes the writing more intriguing. John delves into his aesthetics and addresses some of the common themes of death, religion et cetera. Llewlyn, on the other hand, plies the reader with his thoughts and observations, only touching on the surface. Both staunch atheists, there's no parable in what's written, it's an earthy attempt at undressing humanity in a modest way. It certainly has me in the pursuance of more John Cowper Powys and I wouldn't mind reading Llewlyn's Skin for Skin.

On the whole, a well-written biography. I was a little dubious to begin with as on page 95, the biographer describes a a moment when Benny is seduced by another man, the biographer retells the story but it is unclear if he was retold the story by the man in question. Mark ends the scenario with Benny stumbling over a doormat as he leaves the gentleman's flat. I was wary that this might be some "creative license" on the biographer's part and the book I was delving into might be littered with authorial interpretation of unknown finer details. However, this kind of writing didn't continue.



Being a Benny Hill aficionado, I was aware of most of the material within this sizeable tome but it was nice to read unabridged as can be possible with a biography. I suppose the facile nature of Alfie Hill Junior makes for delving any deeper into the man an obstacle. It certainly was as objective as possible, sometimes, I thought, too much so. But then again, Benny was a fairly objective personality. I did like how the interviews were conducted with friends, relatives and lovers. Mark must have asked quite personal questions which paid off as far as the person in question is concerned.



I once went on a television specialist quiz show with The Life and Times of Benny Hill as my specialist subject, it was enjoyable revisiting all that trivia in this book. I do have to add a personal remark, Benny's declining health must have been horrible to endure and I found the remaining months of his life difficult to read as this predicament must have surely been awful for him, and especially lonely and frightening at times. The archetype tragic comic at the very end. I would recommend this for anyone with an interest in historic comedians.

I imagine it is quite a challenge to write a despicable and deplorable character in the third person when inspiration is drawn from the first person. Moloch Dion isn’t without redeeming or hopeful aspects to his nature, I wouldn’t say he’s complex but he is certainly contradictory and nuanced like any well rounded human being. The problem with looking at this book through any kind of presupposed lens is like never having done something appalling compared to having done something appalling and being either ashamed or enlightened by it. The former will get you nowhere with this book, the latter will allow empathy and objectiveness to guide you through the narrative. I’m a stickler for the idea that writing allows expressive freedom that would otherwise be reprimanded in “real life”. I don’t think literature ought to be a parable and I don’t think it needs to apply a Disney moral clause to its arc. Bastards can be victorious, nastiness and excesses in human nature can be exploited, and decorum done away with ... on the page (without apologies, annotations, or parenthesis necessarily needed, implied or otherwise).



Moloch, or This Gentile World slums the reader through a rambling vignette, a “turquoise gigue of thought”, in a particular place at a particular time of life inhabited by Dion Moloch, recruitment chief for the American Telegraph Company. By all accounts, Dion is a xenophobe and chauvinist, much so, mostly in sentiment. He contradicts this, at times, by proving otherwise through his actions and sometimes his thoughts. There is a conflict of interest between Dion’s friends and Dion’s bigotry. Through him, the reader can see society is struggling with its own sense of righteousness with its diverse multicultural and spiritual mix. This is apparent to me because of the last few chapters. Dion is analogous to the society he belongs to, “This soul of his suddenly began to take on apostolic dimensions. It required attention, like a plant.” At the beginning of Chapter Fifteen, Miller abruptly breaks the convention of his narrative by introducing the first person authorial voice of “we and our” and then finally caps it off by speaking directly with the reader with the second person “you”. He's telling us the story of Dion Moloch, undoubtedly, with a peppering of himself and perhaps allowing for a bit of closeted personal dogmatism to have free range on the page.



Dion is forever chasing the next stimulant while painfully trying to resolve within himself a turbulent and suggestively violent relationship, and at the same time propping his hopes, against a backdrop of literary influences, in becoming a writer. This is the blatant authorial voice coming through the character. To be honest, for me it didn’t quite fit Dion’s landscape and lifestyle. I felt Henry used it a bit too much as a beacon of redemption for Moloch. I’ve always found this with Miller’s writing and, to a great degree, it is what partly makes the reading experience so alive. Another addition to these kind of ballooned narrative devices he inflates when needed is the inclusion of a child who seems to come and go whenever the story calls for it. There were times when I thought, where is the child?



I don’t know how faithfully Miller would have channeled his own relationship into this novel, considering June was supposed to be "author" as far as the publisher was concerned. I imagine she would have read the chapters as they were written before handing them over. I’m sure there were a few digs here and there. The best way for me to sum up the character of Blanche is through one of Miller’s sentences. “Blanche slipped off quietly to clasp her dreams.” There’s really not much more to say than that. Her pains and dilemmas belong in another story. Their explosive relationship is not unlike any other relationship that has become ground down and teetering on the edge of separation. What makes it different from a narrative point of view is that we don’t experience much of them confronting their issues together until the very end. Everything is circumstantial. It isn’t until the end that Moloch reviews his behaviour privately and the relationship takes centre stage. Throughout the novel, we view the abhorrence of the relationship as expressed by Moloch’s friends when they witness it personally or are confided in by Dion. There were many lead-ups in this book but only one claimed the ending.



I enjoyed the casualness of this work. I was satisfied it lacked the raunch of his other prominent works that were to grow from this book. The reason for this is because I found the language he employs to be invigorating. As an aside, there are quite a few spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Not off-putting, but interesting from a writers point of view when considering substance over syntax from an established literary author.



There is one chapter that breaks from the book’s typical vernacular. At one point Dion has a dream where he finds himself equipped with a bow and arrows in a feudal landscape replete with a medieval castle. Miller briefly casts open a fantasy world that would prove him, had he applied himself to that genre, a very capable fantasy writer. “Here nothing of plant or vegetable life could be seen. Petrified limbs of gigantic proportions, carbuncled with glistening mineral crustations (sic), sprawled supinely in this brackish void.”



All in all I found, "It was a funambulesque exhibition sans parasol."

I pleasurably read this book up until part three. The first two parts read like a beatific adventure tale with all the hooks and lines expected of such, it was the third part that was a sinker. I've only read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This, however, was a bit loose on a thread. The pensive ending felt like a narrative filler, I think in the hands of a direct and understated style, it kind of flops. I'm not one to uphold a piece of writing just because surrounding works of an author have been acclaimed, and To Have And Have Not may very well be an acclaimed work, I don't know, but what I do know is that in the range of similar novels of its time, for me it doesn't stand up as being particularly well written. I should have approached it as a few short stories rather than a singular narrative, as this was its origins.

This collection was part of a revised edition of Faber & Faber publications collated by Durrell in a casual fashion. Having enjoyed Durrell's prose, I thought I might dip into his poetry. Not for me, I'm afraid. To be perfectly honest, I needed heavy annotation with these poems, not just a dictionary. Either by Lawrence or someone else. Much of the geographical, mythological, political, historical linguistic referencing was lost on me. I also found the surrounding metaphor or lyrical symbolism too fragmented and oblique to get a satisfactory feeling or picture of each poem's purpose. I noticed that when I did reach for my dictionary, pretty much all the words I found myself looking up were technical terms. Each time I ran aground on a word, it was a technical definition. It made me wonder if Lawrence purposefully chose these technical words to sound cleverer or to make the poem sound more meaningful because in most cases they clashed with the other words used and frankly could have been substituted with better choices. The verse feels stilted, overly constructed and if I have to be honest, somewhat affected. This left me quite detached from it. By page 251, I found a couple of notable but whimsical poems I liked but nothing to quote.

There's something of the 'pataphysical about All or Nothing, reminiscent of Voltaire's Micromegas and Jarry's The Supermale. Cowper Powys's naming conventions certainly are a nod to classic nonsense. Such names as Zug, Wug, Bog, Urk, Bubble, Squeak, etc. The story is rather frenetic from one surreal state to another. The absurd creatures and interplanetary travel is as farfetched as could be fetched from the imagination. The main protagonists, John o' Dreams and Jilly Tewky render the narrative through some sort of mythopoeic madness with plenty of philosophical, theological, mythological substrate to keep the reader intrigued. However, I found myself towards the latter part of the book in a kind of aimless drift amongst the manic plot shifts and to make matters worse, when arriving at the pivotal elucidation of all or nothing, I felt like Cowper Powys was telling me he'd had enough and that was the end of it all. It all seemed like trying for profundity a little too hard.

This copy of De Profundis, although a version of the full text, is abridged due to it being the copy made by Robbie Ross along with Robbie's emendations. De Profundis (from the depths) is a fairly long winded prison letter showing Oscar's incredible ability to blossom insight from conventionality. Despite this letter having been born from a passionate love affair, it is rather reserved, and for me, I couldn't help but feel it a shrewd rebuke, even though it is stated that Wilde was explaining his "conduct" rather than defending it. I believe that Alfred Douglas had intended later on for it to be published along with his own comments. The not unusual tit for tat often played out between broken down lovers. What makes it also interesting is the contrast between this opuscule and the letters Wilde wrote to Bosie after his release, it shows the complexity of emotion and pragmatism in matters of love. I enjoyed the almost voyeuristic feeling of Wilde’s account of lavishing affection, Alfred’s tantrums, creative frustration, character assassination, and tension of judiciously avoiding the love “that dare not speak its name”. Oscar clearly still was very conscious of when writing, the fine line between public and personal confession. I drifted somewhat during his rumination on Christ, but in the back of my mind, couldn’t help but wonder if this too might have been a motivated bit of writing. Although there is an historically valuable substrate on the repression of sexuality, I found through Oscar’s divulgence an even more valuable context surrounding the warts and all of existential humanness. Wilde frequently refers to his genius, but whether he had a genius for interpersonal relationships is wonderfully debatable.

After having re-read Mythago Wood as part of a critical study, I decided to carry on and re-read Lavondyss. Many people have commented that this narrative drags, but in my humble opinion, as with how cinema, prior to rhythmic editing trends, perhaps may seem slow or wafting, Lavondyss is no more unhurried than any other book of the 19th or 20th century. Whereas, Mythago Wood was a deliberate intrusion into the mythical realms of Ryhope, Lavondyss is a more gentle discovery of it through oracle and divination. The character of Tallis really carries the burden of life and death through her imagination, her journey is in the grandest sense of time, epic. Lavondyss is a book of familial sorrow, entropy, of suffering and superstition. You are not going to find a rip-roaring adventure full of spellbinding and combat, this book is more reflective but it is also, as Holdstock mentions in his afterward, a fictional version of a treatise he might have liked to write on the theme of stories and myths. For me, there are some moments that I will never forget, some moments where Robert's writing held me unflinchingly, and others where I just let time unfold in a world where time has no linear meaning.