Search Results

“... more recent critics have been tending to do. Of the books under review, both Laura Curtis’s and Geoffrey Sill’s offer an ethical rather than a socio-economic interpretation of the novel. Geoffrey Sill’s chapter on Robinson Crusoe strikes me as distinctly the weakest part of what is in some respects a very ...”

“... always had a way with children. Presently they were joined by a young Anglo-Irishman called Geoffrey Phibbs and began together what they called the ‘four life’. It had a strong element of the grotesque, for they all took it very seriously, with intense talks and conjurations in the manner of Anthony Powell’s The Kindly Ones with its highly ...”

“... to expand the ‘wonderful Trinity’ to include a not particularly talented Irishman called Geoffrey Phibbs. Phibbs was already married but, at first at least, succumbed to Riding’s imperious sway: he burnt his clothes, donated his books to the Holy Circle’s communal library, and attempted, apparently without much success, to satisfy Riding’s ...”

“... a jungle, for no one had opened the road for me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the window sill with bundles of dust-covered dispatches, and told to make the best of it. Often I have found the sand glittering on the ink where it had been sprinkled when a page was turned. Critics accused him of misreading, falsifying and even inventing his ...”

“... affectionately of the spring in the grounds of Jervaulx Abbey which bubbles up below a stone sill installed by the monks before scampering away underground somewhere as it has done for I suppose a thousand years. I’m cheered by this as I am, even if only in recollection, by the spring at the top of the Raikes near Wilsill in Nidderdale which I first ...”