William Golding achieved international fame and wide critical acceptance with his first published novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954. Since that time his fictional canon has won Golding a special niche in the pantheon of modern British fiction. It is a ni...

William Golding achieved international fame and wide critical acceptance with his first published novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954. Since that time he has produced six other distinguished novels (at least two of which have been mentioned as his masterpi...

The winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in literature, William Golding (1911-1993)is among the most popular and influential British authors to have emerged after World War II. Golding's reputation rests primarily upon his acclaimed first novel Lord of the Fli...

Ian Ritchie Architects Client: Dublin City Council (city architect Jim Barrett Contractor: Siac Rad ley Joint Venture Contract value: £3.07 million Dublin's new spire is visible across the city, an impossibly slender 120m high shaft of stainless steel. Close up,...

One supermarket with northern links is selling bottles of Yorkshire water labelled "While Stocks Last". Tykes should similarly cherish hopes of the Championship. Stocks may not last much longer. The good news for Kent is that Yorkshire have been checked by the team third...

Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building since July, has also become the tallest free-standing structure on Earth, reaching 1,822 feet, the developers said.The Dubai Tower's final height is a closely guarded secret, but completion of the concrete, glass and steel structure is expected by the...

A 150-story lakefront tower that would be the nation's tallest building is a step closer to reality.The City Council has approved a zoning change that clears the way for construction on the 2,000-foot, twisting Chicago Spire.The completed structure would unseat the city's 1,451-foot Sears Tower...

The Spire is essentially a dramatic poem on the lines of [T. S. Eliot's] The Waste Land. Indeed in many ways, it is curiously similar to The Waste Land, and not the least in its power of arousing echoes which constantly refer one out to a variety of works and with varying degrees of significance. In some cases, the echo arouses little more than the pleasing sense of recognition…. At the other extreme, the myth of Balder is as essential to the construction of The Spire as the Grail legend is to...

One never has to read more than a few pages of a William Golding novel to know that it contains the essentials of good fiction. First and foremost, one feels the energy that has been put into it—the intensity of mental concentration that one responds to as if it were a strong physical act. Second, one notes the precision and discipline that funnel the energy into the chosen course, and without which energy is just a sprawling nuisance. "The Spire" is only 215 pages long, but a bad autho...

[The Spire] is possibly the best thus far of William Golding's haunting parables of the human condition. The setting is medieval England at the time of the building of the cathedrals, but the atmosphere is at once so much of a never-never land and so full of nervous suspense that it seems like a cross between [Maurice] Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and the high-strung melodrama of the early Graham Greene. The implications of Mr. Golding's tale, as always, are ominous ...