LOST at the (62nd) Emmys

by Debra Murphy August 30, 2010 Movies/TV
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Everything old is new again. When growing up, avid movie/TV fan that I was, I always watched the Emmy & Oscar ceremonies, and nine time out of ten went to bed deeply disgrunteld, my favorites having been bypassed in favor of some “It” show du jour. Last night, 0ut of the twelve or thirteen Emmy [...]

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The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

by Rachel Murphy August 25, 2010 Books
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reviewed by Rachel Murphy It is in a night in 1946, a black wet January night that our narrator, Maurice Bendrix—whose very name implies something bent, slanted—wants to draw his reader to in order to begin his tale, which, in his words, is a record of hate far more than of love. He begins with [...]

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David Lodge on Muriel Spark

by Debra Murphy August 9, 2010 Books
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While I enjoy reading literary criticism of a variety of stripes, nothing beats lit crit written by one terrific writer in appreciation of the work of another terrific writer. I always want to leap up and leg it to my Macbook to scan the digisphere for sackfuls of cheap used copies by both writers, or [...]

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Nicholas Shakespeare on the “Voice” of Graham Greene

by Debra Murphy July 31, 2010 Books
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The summer 2010 issue of Intelligent Life magazine has a wonderful article (part of its “Notes on a Voice” series) by Nicholas Shakespeare on the literary “voice” of Catholic novelist Graham Greene. If you are a writer especially, this piece is must reading, and I confess I took a few notes. Here’s a small excerpt, [...]

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Son of Dust by H.F.M. Prescott

by Debra Murphy July 27, 2010 Books
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Paperback: 436 pages Publisher: Loyola Press (January 1, 2007) ISBN-10: 0829423524 ISBN-13: 978-0829423525 reviewed by Debra Murphy Originally published in 1956 by MacMillan, Son of Dust by Anglo-Catholic novelist Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott is a historical romance set in eleventh century Normandy shortly before “William the Conqueror”, Duke of Normandy, crossed the Channel to capture [...]

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Piers Paul Read: A Life in Books

by Debra Murphy July 3, 2010 Books
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Nicbolas Wroe has a wonderful article in The Guardian UK about prolific Catholic writer and novelist Piers Paul Read. Read’s latest novel, The Misogynist, will be published this month by Bloomsbury. Besides giving a nice little biographical sketch of Read, Wroe also writes at some length on the development of Read’s sometimes controversial social and [...]

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Ann Begley on Muriel Spark in America magazine

by Debra Murphy June 28, 2010 Books

The most recent edition of America magazine includes an article by Ann Begley on the life and work of Catholic novelist Muriel Spark. The article is largely inspired by a newly published biography of Spark, “seventeen years in the making”, by Martin Stannard. Here’s an excerpt from Begley’s article dealing with some of the more [...]

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The Body of This by Andrew McNabb

by Debra Murphy June 10, 2010 Books
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published by Warren Machine Company ISBN: 978-1-934866-05-4 reviewed by Debra Murphy The Liturgy of the Hours (Office of Readings), the Seventh Week of Easter contains the following excerpt from a sermon by a sixth century African bishop: The disciples spoke in the language of every nation. At Pentecost God chose this means to indicate the [...]

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The Shakespeare Conspiracy

by Debra Murphy June 7, 2010 Movies/TV

The Oxfordian position in the obstreperous Authorship Question controversy was surely given a shot in the arm when the great Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi came out as a supporter. As I have said on these pages before, I am not an Oxfordian myself, but I have enough respect for enough adherents of that view, as [...]

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Marilynne Robinson’s Critique of the “New Orthodoxy”

by Debra Murphy June 2, 2010 Books

Marilynne Robinson, Christian novelist and author of the beautiful (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) novel Gilead has come out with a new book, non-fiction this time, entitled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. In it, according to this article in Publishers Weekly, Robinson writes on the relationship between science [...]

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