cheers
August 5, 2007, 7:48pm
1
<p>Just finished ‘Arthur and George’, by Julian Barnes, shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2005. Fascinating reading for those who think about nature versus nurture and the value of heli-style interference.</p>
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Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Catholic Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George a Birmingham solicitor, is happy in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings into sharp focus not just this long-forgotten case but the inner workings of the two men and the wider psychology of the age. Arthur & George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion.
<a href=“http://www.julianbarnes.com/bib/arthur&george.html[/url] ”>http://www.julianbarnes.com/bib/arthur&george.html</a></p> ;