Mark > Recent Status Updates

"I lay there and listened to them and felt them, with no more protest than if I had been corpse examined by budding pathologists for the cause of death. But I was not dead, I was alive twice over". Genuinely moved by this. Drabble has created a heart achingly sad character

'She clicks a button and Vera Lynn blasts out, making meeting again sound like some kind of threat"......Now that just made me laugh

Fascinating, though some good proof reading and editing would have enhanced the experience

Lordy. I am beginning to adore that dwarf. He's fab.

Bloody hell.

On Virginia Woolf :- "A spoiled brat. All right, she committed suicide but she didn't have to take the dog with her". Interesting literary criticism Muriel.

"The reality of the dream which is artistic vision, the dream of reality which is self-justifying vanity"

"The Italians regarded her as a Kafka in a skirt. She saw herself as Lucrezia Borgia in trousers".........

Fascinating chapter on "The Driver's seat" which is perhaps my least favourite of her novels. I am intrigued, maybe I shall have to remove it from my 'never again' shelf

On "The Public Image" one critic wrote 'an atom bomb in an attache case'

Alan Pryce-Jones on our Muriel:- "beautifully constructed with Mozartian precision. The world in her eyes is as formal and lively as a ballroom but it is a ballroom which at any moment may burst into flames." I am sure she liked that one.

Lionel Trilling in conversation with Muriel. "You must read 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye' " With what must have taken enormous restraint it appears Spark simply said "I wrote it". Awkward

On her father's death " my father's funeral was our first warm day. A man he did not like fell into his grave........ He had more affection for me than anyone else, so that is gone out of the world". There is something heartbreakingly lovely about this.

Excellent reflection on "memento mori", my favourite Spark novel

Edith Sitwell's advice to Spark as to how to deal with recalcitrant men. "my dear, you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, make an occasion to see that man again, focus the glasses on him and sit looking at him through them as if he were an insect. Just look and look."

is it just me or is there something slightly oxymoronic or at least weird stage namey bout Muriel Spark's friend the 'chic lesbian' being called Kay Dick

"hers is a God whose most sovereign power seems to stem from an urge to keep human beings in a state of suprise"

This is weird. just culling the 'people I follow' as I was conscious that I never get to read their reviews, difficult enough keeping up with friends, but I have just come on one who I have supposedly been following for a while and yet he has set his profile to private so now I cannot read anything he puts up, even if I wanted to but nor can i become an unfollower which is what i want to do. Strange.

well it is certainly reflecting on some big questions. Ann Widdecombe is not shying away from the fact that easy or knee jerk solutions to moral questions are very rarely wholly honest ones

"Everything you can imagine, Everything you can't imagine"

This is an incredibly clever but wonderfully simple construction. Each story interlinked through a character from previous story but Lordy they're wrist slicingly miserable. You just await this story's death and lo it comes

Good grief, brilliant collection of inter-linked stories but it comes to something when one is relieved that only a horse dies in the latest one. Lordy they're depressing

Have just read the quote of the day by Cynthia Ozick and a tad surprised to see she is a 'master of fiction'. Now I realize all woman thespians are actors and not actresses and evidently 'mistress' has unfortunate connotations but I still think it a bit weird that she is heralded a 'master of...'. Surely another word more suited to cover both men and women proficient in the field could have been found. End of rant !!

"As Christians, far from supplanting the Jews as God's chosen people. we are privileged to share in their everlasting covenant. For if that covenant is not everlasting, if God is not faithful to the Jews, then we're all in big trouble " Great line, great wisdom. Read it and weep bigots

"You are what you eat, as the folk saying goes. And you are, in some ways, what you read ". Abridged that is another T shirt.

Wow. unadulterated misery. i would say a real page turner but i was listening to it on audiobooks. Review maybe tomorrow, if i have crawled from my pit of bleak despair and grimy horror by then

"the choice between West and East is sometimes one between which particular squalid bunch of murderous fanatics one prefers to back ". OUCH