Romeo and Juliet

Felipe Gravier and Lorenzo Schiavo review:

We think that Romeo and Juliet tells the story of two star-crossed lovers whose families are in a terrible fight which prevents them from coming together. How far the couple will go to be together becomes the focus of the story. Of his richest poetry. The opening and closing choruses are some of his most outstanding work. Romeo's It is a brilliant love story but not much more. It still possesses however some wooing of Juliet is fabulously written. The Friar gets the best lines. Mercutio is one the best friends of Romeo. It is not as good as Shakespeare has written but it's still a fabulous book and up there with his best work. One part of the play we didn't like was that for the tow families get arrange there two kids had to die.
The English language wasn't finally finished so Shakespeare had the liberty to create words and play with the language, as he liked. That's why It was so difficult to understand what each character wanted to express so the teacher had to explain us each of that words and teach us all the words in that age and told us which were the words in the English of today.

This book provides lots of Shakespeare's Storys like "A Midsummer's Night Dream" and "Hamlet" with a children's fairy tale twist. The storys are the same as Shakespeare's, but easier for children to understand. My favorite story was Hamlet because I had just seen the play. A while after we read Children's Shakespeare and it helped me to understand Hamlet better.

Shakespeare is for kids and adults in E. Nesbit's creative mind. I always liked fairy tales, but I couldn't read Shakespeare very well. In Children's Shakespeare E. Nesbit turned his work into fairy tales without changing the story and morals. This book is not much like Nesbit's other books because it was written by Shakespeare, but I bet there are some simularities.

This book was a overall well writen book and I beleive E. Nesbit put a lot of hard work into her books in her life-time. I'm sure if she were alive now she would still be writing good books to this day.

Hamilton addresses the diminishing importance of the individual in the face of the modern superstate. This novel resembles in atmosphere the 'film noir' genre of the contemporary cinema. George Harvey Bone's pathetic career is 'sensationalised', made lurid and larger than life, so that he becomes like a figure in a melodrama. Hamilton uses language that focus the reader's view through those of Bone, self-obsessedly viewing his own actions, his "great golfers hands" on the golf club for example, as he tries to invest himself with some feeling of worth while sub-consciously plotting murder. Bone's schizophrenic world threatens to explode throughout the book , just as the dark clouds of war with Europe gather threateningly in the background. The tiny tragedy of Bone' s demise is deliberately made to read like pulp fiction, in a sense, and the report of his death, forced off the front page by the breaking out of war, is likewise reduced to a tabloid headline.

The whole setting of the book is artificial; "the agony of Netta beneath the electric light"; the great wave of laughter (the world's laughter) that breaks over Bone as he enters the lime-lit Brighton theatre, are part of the harsh artificiality of the world that Bone inhabits. His friends are cynical and talk enthusiastically of fascism.

I am reminded by this book of the world described in Henry Miller's early work (Tropic of Capricorn etc) and of George Orwell's 'Coming up for Air' in which, once again, events build against the mounting threat of World War II, and the protagonists (George 'Fatty' Bowling) sense of personal history, values and identity are buried by the onslaught of suburban sprawl and its attendant advertising, materialism and the dislocation of community.

Hamilton predicts the present day world of media obsession with personal agony, which trivialises all human anguish and tribulation, reducing human experience and suffering to a commodity to be consumed, rather than a shared touchstone of communication, understanding and empathy.

Hamilton's brilliance lies in the clever contrivance of allowing us to feel Bone's pathetic agony, and yet to see it transformed into a trite, turgid melodrama, which is interchangeable in the daily press with a major international war. This is the kind of attitude, towards the small business of being human, that was necessary to prepare the world for the introduction of concentration camps and mass political executions.

Imagine George Harvey Bone as a character in a Thomas Hardy novel: (Bone could be transformed into a country rube quite easily!) His unfortunate story would be imbued with a sense of sanctity and respect that Hamilton deliberately defiles and destroys before our very eyes, using exactly the same means in achieving this end as the media of his day, and as the media of the present day does in a way that both Hamilton and Orwell could forsee, perhaps, but surely never appreciate the oppressive monstrous extent to which it has come.

This is one of the last novels, it seems to me, written before the obsession with the selfish concerns of the individual (the first article of faith of capitalism) became the only concern of the writer. Hamilton's book clearly indicates the coming of this self obsession. From here on, solipsism rules OK?

This is truly one of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century...it's a sad commentary on our country when this is unavailable in the US while so much trash can be had in every mall bookstore. Netta is without a doubt the most memorable villain in modern literature.

Simple, stupid George is in with a bad crowd - the sinister Peter, his crowd of unemployed hangers-on and the beautiful but cruel Netta with whom George is love. Spurned over and over, humiliated and ultimately resented for his weakness, it becomes increasingly difficult not to offer George your greatest sympathy, even given his occasional psychotic episodes where he realises he must kill Netta and escape his flimsy existence. This tale is an intense and moving study into the pain of unrequited love.

If you've ever seen the movie "Gaslight" with Ingrid Bergman and wondered where it came from. This is the play. It is about a handsome husband, Mr. Manningham, who is torturing his wife into insanity. Moments after her husband has left the house on one of his "walks", she gets a visiter who proves to her that her husband is a criminal and that he is trying to dispose of her. This is when the Manningham's begin to play a thrilling, exciting melodramatic game.

My name is Michal Tal. My book of the same name, only spelled, "The Lion & the Cross" is a historical novel about the Spanish Inquisition, and was published by Minerva Press in 1995. Who is Joan Hamilton? When was her book published? And how did she come to have my book's title on hers? Please help!

If you're looking for a tightly written, disciplined thriller,
a la Dorothy Sayers, this is not the book for you. However, if you like pitchperfect satirical writing on a par with Kingsley Amis, "the Charmer" will leave you as sweetly satisfied as a strychnine petit four.
Hamilton is an oddly overlooked novelist. His plays "Rope" and "Gaslight" (from "Angel Street") garnered him welldeserved attention, but his novels are brilliant, and I don't understand why they're out of print. "The Charmer" is a portait of four suburban British self-deluded "normal" people, each playing out his or her own fantasy of who he/she fancies himself, while the author gives us an unsparing, brilliantly misanthropic portrait of who each actually is. -Doesn't sound thrilling, but this novel is funny, hard to put down, and ultimately profoundly sad.
It was made into a PBS Masterpiece Theatre series a decade or so ago, with Nigel Havers as the eponymous Charmer.

Ernest Ralph Gorse - you can call him "Rafe" or "Ralph", is the best way to discover how easy it is sympathize with the criminal kind. Hamilton is wonderful at sending up those-who-should-be-sent-up. Originally titled 'Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse", this is part of 'The Gorse Trilogy" chronicalling the rise, rise and fall of E.R.G. Available in England only as a trilogy. Please, please insist upon re-publication of it in this country

Fans of sharp, dry wit will love this book. The unfolding of the plot is entertaining, and the stellar writing makes it even better. This is one of the best books I have ever read. Check out the Masterpiece Theater presentation of the book as well.

I read Hangover Square and thoughht is was one of the best books I've read. SOS lacks the eye for detail and conversation that made Hangover Square. However, it's worth a read - but try Hangover Square first.

The plot probably doesn't sound too enticing: it's about the rather hopeless and somewhat insane inhabitants of a boarding house located in the suburbs of London during World War II. What makes the book so incredible - and viciously funny - is Hamilton's fanatical attention to the idiosyncrasies and petty hatreds of the main characters. The 'heroine' of the book, Miss Roach, starts off as the main target of the utterly insane Mr. Thwaites, who delights daily in causing her the most excruciating embarassment in front of the other guests. He's soon joined in this pastime by a newly arrived German boarder, Vicki Kugelmann, who goes from being Miss Roach's friend to becoming her most insidious tormentor. Throw in a rather dumb American Lieutentant who lusts after any female under the age of 60, and you have the blackest of comedies spiralling towards inevitable tragedy.

I said the plot doesn't sound that much, but the power of it, as with all of Hamilton's books, lies in the unique atmosphere of agony, loneliness and booze-sodden desperation his characters struggle in.

Along with Hangover Square and One Thousand Streets Under the Sky, this is a tremendous novel. Hamilton writes beautifully about a cast of dreadfuls- the parochial bores, the bitchy backstabbing friends, and above all the boozers.

It is rare to read a book set in the 1940s which still seems so contemporary. The humour is biting and the depths and subtletys of character equal to Greene, Waugh and their ilk. Hamilton's writing brings to mind the Martin Amis school of tales from the London gutter, but his characters are achingly alive and never seem cartoonish.

If you can get your hands on the above(try amazon.co.uk), read all three...

In reality, this volume is a collection of three separate but related Hamilton novels from the late twenties-early thirties: The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement.

The first relates the story of a barman's obsession with a scheming prostitute, the second is a tale of a "nice girl"'s downfall through drink, and the final novel tells of a plain-looking barmaid's emotional turmoil when pursued by a much older man.

These themes, and the dialogue used by the characters, are inevitably dated. However, Hamilton's wonderfully compassionate writing make simple themes appear to be universal and timeless.

Indeed, loneliness, unrequited love, fear of rejection, unfulfilled dreams etc are components of the universal human experience. However, in Hamilton's hands, these components never result in full-blown despair. The characters are so resilient that there is always, even after the most appalling experience, a note of optimism.

Few British writers have written so eloquently about the simple dreams, modest personal ambitions and cultural limitations of ordinary people in what was then a rigid class society.

In particular, his insight into working class "pub culture" (in these novels and later works such as "Hangover Square" and "Slaves of Solitude") is extraordinary. Its a pity his "research" led to such heavy alcohol dependence, with its resultant impact upon his literary achievement!.

The three novels in "20,000 streets" are a great introduction to Hamilton, and along with his later more sophisticated work, make a case for a much belated re-appraisal of his place in 20th century British literature.