Reviews on The Review

“Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange” – Reviewed by Elizabeth Stancombe
This year Anthony Burgess’s self-dismissed novel “A Clockwork Orange” celebrated its fiftieth birthday with a special edition and a host of events in Manchester, his birth town. On the 18th of October   “Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange” was held part of the Manchester [...]

Deryn Rees-Jones and Paul Farley by Flora Anderson
As part of Literature Live, I went to see Paul Farley and Deryn Rees-Jones reading from their new collections The Dark Film and Burying the Wren respectively. It was run as a University of Manchester event in the John Thaw Studio on Oxford road, and was a real [...]

Penelope Lively and the Power of Reading
Penelope Lively: A Reading Life at Manchester Literature Festival, Wednesday 10th October 2012 at Whitworth Art Gallery, 7.30pm
The books we read in our youth can stay with us forever, perhaps unconsciously and perhaps to be forgotten about until a much later point in our lives. This was certainly case [...]

“We are all refugees”
By Jessica Skoog
Review of David Constantine and Pawel Huelle at the
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, October 8, 2012
 
            As I hand my ticket to the event host, I feel an excitement akin to a child going on a carnival ride. There, just beyond the thick black curtain, awaits an experience I’ve never [...]

Homes Away From Home

at Manchester Literature Festival Event: David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October, 6:00pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

To the mild stupefaction of the staff in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, I arrive to this—the second event of the first day of the Manchester Literature Festival, and, incidentally, the first event of [...]

Paul Mills, Voting for Spring (Smith/Doorstop, £9.95) and You Should’ve Seen Us, (Smith/Doorstop, £6.95)

Paul Mills, at a reading in York in the late 1990s, was the first writer I ever heard to suggest that the next major movement in poetry and also literary theory would have ‘something to do with the environment. It’s inevitable’. In [...]

Parks is not afraid of the definite article; not only in the titles of his books, which also includes The Cage but also with the titles of the poems: ‘The Northern Lights’, ‘The Girl in the Garden’, ‘The March’. He also has poems entitled ‘Miners’, ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Standards’. The use of the definite article establishes, [...]

A couple of years ago, I took my son up to Hull University. It was an open day for potential Chemistry students, but in the middle of the opening presentation, the tutor showed a slide of ‘Hull’s Three Poets’. The slide was the famous picture of of Larkin, Andrew Motion and Douglas Dunn outside the [...]

The quarrel isn’t often with the poems, though it can be; the quarrel often seems to be with Fenton as a purveyor of his own extravagant gifts as a poet. Because Fenton is always likely to be excising parts of his canon in ways that can seem supremely irritating to his many deep admirers. [...]

It would be too easy to point to the Evan Jones’ autobiography to find the dynamic for this book: a Canadian-Greek, resident in Manchester, married to a German. What would be more natural than for Jones to look at the world askew? And to view it from the various kinds of transport that take [...]