Search Results

“... But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.’ Thus the good Sir Thomas Browne, meditating on urns, and on mankind’s dealings with the last mystery. Sumerian Gilgamesh journeyed to the Garden of the Sun at the world’s end to find the herb of eternal youth; but when he bent to drink at a fountain, a serpent stole it, proving its power by shedding his old skin ...”

“... Ever since his death in mid-career, Alexander has been projecting from his undiscovered tomb the powerful presence he exercised in life. To those around him, his magnetism was not mysterious: it was a natural phenomenon with which they lived. Once his contemporaries were dead, it became a legend: something transcending his recorded acts, and a receptacle for every kind of fantasy ...”

“... It was Renault, pronounced Renolt, not as in the car: this is one of the many things her admirers will not have known about the low-profile, best-selling author of some of the most remarkable historical fiction of the century. David Sweetman met Mary Renault in 1981, when he interviewed her for the BBC; he had been under the spell of her books since he read them as ‘an awkward, insecure teenager ...”

“... and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular. These days, though she’s never been out of print – this is the second reissue of her two novels about Theseus since 2015 – she attracts a more ...”

“... given the taboos throughout most of history on other kinds), but a personal letter from Mary Renault speaks to the way the figure of Bagoas, ‘a eunuch of remarkable beauty … who had been loved by Darius and was afterwards to be loved by Alexander’, inspired her to write The Persian Boy (1972). It’s clear from the letter, and from the ...”

“... crowded with dead bodies as was, in the upshot, the Hotel New Hampshire. As its title indicates, Mary Renault’s Funeral Games is another busy series of deaths. Babylon is hushed, the courtiers agitate in whispers, as Alexander the Great lies dying. He has conquered the world but left no clear succession, and the novel records how his generals and ...”

“... she detects in work by writers ranging from Defoe and Diderot to Compton Mackenzie, Woolf and Mary Renault are not for the most part memorably haunting. There’s a depressing mixture of pretension and weary piety about the argument’s crowning assertion that lesbianism is ‘the repressed idea at the heart of patriarchal culture’. The piece on ...”

“... piece of Morris wallpaper). But later in the century, artists, film-makers and novelists (notably Mary Renault) in their turn found inspiration in what he and his team had created. There are very few movies set in the heroic age of Greece that do not derive their backdrop, at least in part, from the ‘Palace of Minos’. This popularity is hardly ...”

“... for example, that Betjeman was friendly with P. Morton Shand and his lovely daughters, Elspeth and Mary, ‘who were to marry, respectively, the politician Geoffrey Howe (now Lord Howe) and the architect James (later Sir James) Stirling’. Sometimes whole sentences seem designed merely to boast of good breeding: the good looks of the young Candida, Hillier ...”

“... firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe … had in some form and by ...”

“... circumscription, is also a drastic loss for the novel-reader. Not for Vidal any luxuriance à la Mary Renault. Instead we have a flatness redolent of the travel writings of Edward Heath. A busy market scene: ‘Traders from every corner of the world offered their wares.’ An expedition through a jungle: ‘The journey through the forest was ...”

“... any more than queer people have. In his survey of gay novels, Griffin leaves out writers from Mary Renault to Gordon Merrick, whose bestselling, sexually daring Charlie and Peter trilogy explores a life-long relationship between two men. He ignores the novels of Iris Murdoch, whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, from 1970, features one of the most ...”

“... and the oddly convincing atmosphere of generosity and high-spiritedness.Game recognised game: Mary Renault sent O’Brian a fan letter. She was even more impressed by Post Captain (1972), the second instalment, which introduces some more interesting female characters – chief among them Diana Villiers, Maturin’s on-off love interest – and gives ...”

“... celebration of, the ordinary. I remember, about thirty years ago, reading all the modern novels of Mary Renault, in which nothing separated her middle-class characters from the other occupants of suburbia except their erotic preferences: why, they wondered, wouldn’t society let them join the club? Davidson’s book seems at times fuelled by the same ...”

“... to internationalise its ways to join the rest of the world. Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi super-boss long held in a Tokyo cell at the mercy of prosecutors who could keep him detained indefinitely by periodically advancing new accusations that he made improper payments to himself, would emphatically agree. He complained that ...”