What is enjoyable in Warhol, as usual, is the mixture of humor (conscious or unconscious?) and perversion. Hence the best moments [in I, A Man] are the staircase misunderstanding between Baker and a Mao-capped girl who resists his pressing ...

Federico Fellini, discussing his film I Clowns in the French periodical L'Arc, attributes the disappearance of the clown to the sense of absurdity and disorder which pervades modern life. "The clown," he says, "was always the caricature of ...

The eight short stories in I, etcetera … reflect a vital and restless imagination cooking away in several directions…. The typical Sontag character is intelligent, self-analytical, and suffering from a non-specific form of anxiety or di...

The book, I Heard the Owl Call my Name is primarily about the conflict between the natives and the European descendents, and how they have affected each other. It also illustrates how cruel nature can be sometimes, and how it can be such a...

Although Marguerite Johnson experiences an amazingly difficult childhood where she is often displaced and even raped at a young age, she is able to somehow overcome these adversities and succeed in life. One would wonder how much psycho...

Isaac Asimov thrills the reader with his story-telling ability in "I, Robot".  Of course, many of Asimov's ideas provide a ploy to add suspense to the story.  However, when the plot completely disagree with the laws which he himse...

Devoted to both the profound necessity and the sublime silliness of gratuitous social interchange, Ohayo is a rather subtler and grander work than might appear at first. Commonly referred to as a remake of Ozu's silent masterpiece I Was Bor...

The Jewish poet, novelist, and playwright Isaac Loeb Peretz (1851-1915) was the leader of Yiddishism, a cultural movement dedicated to making Yiddish the national language of Jewish people throughout the world. Isaac Peretz was born in Zam...

SOURCE: Wintle, Justin. “A Pinch of Aji No Moto.” New Statesman 107, no. 2761 (17 February 1984): 23-4. In the following review, Wintle praises A Japanese Mirror, calling it an “engaging, at times disturbing read.” Much has been mad...

Ian Hamilton defined his poems with clarity in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (Summer 1974) when he characterized them as "dramatic lyrics .... the intense climatic moment of a drama," adding that the reader must supply "the prose...

Muhammad ibn Battuta (1304-ca. 1368) was a Moorish traveler whose extensive voyages as far as Sumatra and China, southern Russia, the Maldives, the East African coast, and Timbuktu made him one of the greatest medieval travelers. Muhammad ...

[In Icebreaker James Bond is] in Finland and Russia—for more of the same, just colder. This time Gardner's neo-Bond (who's less vividly characterized with every book) is sent by M to join three other agents—a CIA man, a KGB man, and bea...

The power and authority of a person or group of people was very important theme in Ancient Art. Power could be displayed in many methods. Changing the image of the body in size, beauty, youthfulness, and physique were propaganda tactics u...

SOURCE: Mikhail, E. H. “Self-Revelation in An Ideal Husband.” Modern Drama 11 (1968): 180-86. In the following essay, Mikhail perceives An Ideal Husband as a reflection of Wilde's personal torment and a foreshadowing of the scandal that...

J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, once said, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence," when he was asked if The Lord of...

SOURCE: Mortimer, Gail L. “The Ironies of Transcendent Love in Faulkner's The Wild Palms.” Faulkner Journal 1, no. 2 (spring 1986): 30-42. In the following essay, Mortimer contends that Faulkner's narrative strategy in The Wild Palms ca...

Upon opening the book, and beginning to read the first chapter, it felt as though the author was introducing me to the book as if in real life. The author spoke as if he wasn't telling the story, but instead preparing you for the story. T...

Lindsay Anderson thinks "If … is really a vision, something like the Writing on the Wall." We should therefore look for something prophetic, cryptic, poetic, transforming. Anderson and his skilful screenwriter David Sherwin have certainly...

Íñigo López de Mendoza, Lord of Hita and Buitrago, was granted the titles of conde del Real and marqués de Santillana by King Juan II of Castile after the Battle of Olmedo (1445). He is best known by the second ...

What we are seeing [in Il Bidone] is Fellini in a kind of Stylistic transition, and a search, too, for an adequate expression of the director's highly personalized vision of, as he has said, "the terrible difficulty people have in talking t...

If you found that by the end of nearly two hours of The Decameron you'd had enough medieval bawdiness for quite some time, then be warned: miss out on The Canterbury Tales. It's not just that Pasolini's latest feature … is concerned with ...

SOURCE: "Focused on the Body," in The New York Times Book Review, November 30, 1986, p. 12. In the following review, Brunette lauds John Shepley's translation of Pasolini's Arabian Nights and Other Stories. Pier Paolo Pasolini was much more...

"The Ill-Made Knight" (who is none other, of course, than Sir Lancelot, "best knight in all the world"—and how he worked to earn that title!) is drawn in chunks from Malory, from [John] Milton's "History of England," from one Thomas Bulfi...

Two itinerant fliers meet on a Midwestern field and the one, a retired Messiah, Donald W. Shimoda, teaches the other, the narrator, Richard, how to see the world and everything in it as illusion. The teacher is assassinated, and the pupil r...

SOURCE: Lobe, Cliff. “Reading the ‘Remembered World’: Carceral Architecture and Cultural Mnemonics in Peter Carey's Illywhacker.” Mosaic 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 17-34. In the following essay, Lobe examines the postcolonial nature...