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“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel ...”

“... safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A ...”

“... of The Iron Whim concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines (once upon a time the word also referred to the ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid ...”

“... really separates Borne from the creations of artists like Bourgeois and de Bruyckere – and of David Cronenberg, whom VanderMeer has noted as a major influence – is that the rank odours of sex and disease are what give body horror its potency. In comparison, VanderMeer’s menagerie can feel rather antiseptic, not to mention symbolically ...”

“... act. As for his fellow creatures, they are to be found not in the entomologist’s nightmare, as David Cronenberg would have it, but in the homestead paradigm of the old American TV series. Burroughs belongs, along with Lassie and Champion the Wonder Horse, in a dignified menagerie of beasts who have performed incredible feats with only an inkling of ...”

“... strictly experimental or popular but both, like Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg. Also distinctive is his selection of novelists; his semi-paranoid view of our ‘techno-institutional worlds’ leads Crary to turn to Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.In 1982, Crary published a brilliant essay on horror ...”

“... from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter sent to him by ‘the First Eric ...”

“... so on. Then he returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David Foster Wallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it posture towards the laity. ‘The writer ...”

“... of British Airways. For Ian Ash, British Telecom’s Director of Corporate Relations. For David Quarmby, Chairman of the British Tourist Authority and the English Tourist Board. You get the picture. A kind of mega musical set on a desert island (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tempest). Something so new and adventurous and breathtakingly original that it ...”