D. M. Thomas Summary

Biography EssayD. M. Thomas is widely known for his novel The White Hotel, which quickly rose to the top of the best-seller lists after its American publication in the spring of 1981. Yet, he is als... Read more

In the following review, Goreau offers unfavorable evaluation of Lying Together and Thomas's “Russian Nights” series. Goreau finds fault in Thomas's preoccupation with theo... Read more

In the following review Houston offers positive assessment of Flying to Love. Near the end of this novel based on the murder of John F. Kennedy, D. M. Thomas has one of his characters, a psychologi... Read more

In the following review, O'Brien offers tempered assessment of The Puberty Tree. It can seem that there are two D. M. Thomases. On the one hand, there is the poet of memorable lyrics and dra... Read more

In the following review, Busch offers tempered evaluation of Pictures at an Exhibition, which he describes as “alternately horrifying and annoying.” In Pictures at an Exhibition, D. M... Read more

In the following review, Kincaid offers positive evaluation of Eating Pavlova. In 1824 Sam Goldwyn, recognizing that “there is nothing really so entertaining as a really great love story,&#x... Read more

In the following review, Chamberlain offers positive assessment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been an outstanding figure of the century, despite current attempts in Moscow t... Read more

In the following review, Dickstein offers unfavorable evaluation of Ararat. The reader opens Ararat with a mixture of expectations. D. M. Thomas's third novel in four years, it comes in the ... Read more

In the following review, Stade offers positive evaluation of Sphinx. American readers know D. M. Thomas best for The White Hotel (1981), a novel remarkable for its tragic sense of recent history, i... Read more

In the following review, Dudar offers unfavorable assessment of Memories and Hallucinations. The distinguished English writer D. M. Thomas interrupts the last chapter of Memories and Hallucinations... Read more

Critical Essay by Alan Brownjohn Love and Other Deaths: you can take the choice. I don't feel that D. M. Thomas, a poet of ranging and fertile imagination, has yet settled for what he really w... Read more

Critical Essay by John Matthias There are always plenty of paramours in D. M. Thomas's work, and one must respect, if even at a certain hesitant distance, his nervous, experimental, and erotic... Read more

Critical Essay by Nicholas Shrimpton D.M. Thomas is a notable translator of modern Russian verse and [The Flute Player] is an imaginative meditation on the themes and landscapes of that literature. A... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Kemp [The Flute Player is] a fantasy about art and totalitarianism. The setting for this is an unnamed, vaguely representative city where pogroms, purges and plagues are unlea... Read more

Critical Essay by Andrew Motion By making the central character [of Birthstone] a split personality [D. M. Thomas] attaches his book to a long line of doppelgänger fictions, and thereby applie... Read more

Critical Essay by Dick Davis There is nothing underwritten about D. M. Thomas's new book of poems [Dreaming in Bronze]; many of them are vigorous monologues by the neurotic and obsessed. Mr Th... Read more

Critical Essay by John Bemrose Swallow picks up where Ararat left off. Once again [Thomas] confronts his readers with the indefatigable Russian poet Rozanov, a womanizer with an extraordinary talent ... Read more

Critical Essay by Booklist [Thomas] considers himself primarily a poet, even in his fiction, which shares with his verse a preoccupation, or rather, an obsession, with sex and death. [In Selected Poe... Read more

Critical Essay by Anne Tyler It's not really necessary, of course, for a reviewer to make the plot entirely clear to prospective readers. But in Ararat, the whole point is the plot—its ... Read more