Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“I simply haven't the time to read this huge, ridiculous and obsessively detailed historical novel from the Raj, in which everyone calls each other thou and thee and ye-of-the-lotos-feet, but I want to place on record that I cannot resist Raj-era orthography: "Oordoo"! "Lownee"! "Anunda Bye"! O, I am slain!”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Tuesday, April 16, 2013. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“How fashions do change. Norma "would be difficult to revive successfully"? I hear snorts of mirth from the 1950s. But how nice to see all these Golden Age Siegfrieds and Turandots in full costume.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Sunday, June 3, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Forster's happiest novel, in which Italy saves Lucy Honeychurch's soul by bringing her to "the end of the Middle Ages", aflame with the Humanism of the heart.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Monday, February 6, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

3 of 3 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“Not for the first time, it's become a dangerous thing to claim greatness for Uncle Tom's Cabin. Since it is great, this is raises difficulties. But the reader who resists the current call to beat the long-dead author about the head first with our cultural politics and then with her own will discover a work that outweighs the sum of some fairly fabulous parts: Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel rings with abolitionist rage, but even if it weren't a fiery and impassioned polemic, it would remain a ripping yarn and melodrama of the highest Dickensian order, a social novel overflowing with humour and pathos and adventure, its every character crackling with theatrics. I could never resist it, and now I know I shouldn't try.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Tuesday, December 20, 2011. ( reply | view 1 replies | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“I cheated and read only "Don't Look Now" -- but what a chilling, hallucinatory story that is.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Friday, December 16, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“Whose neuroses are these, author's or narrator's? At any rate, they provide the hormonal ingredients for this plaint which is, like his other bodily expulsions, as funny as it is embarrassing.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Friday, December 16, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“"The Legend of Courteisie": Everyone who isn't teddibly courteous to everyone else is teddibly rude, and the attractively-named 'Blatant Beast' sinks the fangs of scandal into manflesh and womanflesh alike. Shepherds dance with the Graces of Classical myth, and petulant Cupid hands out punishments to recalcitrant spinsters. Yawn.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Thursday, December 1, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“Oh dear, I must admit defeat -- grudgingly. I find Tom Jones ponderous and unreadable, and the unrelenting stupidity of everyone in it fails to amuse me. Remind me to try again in ten years.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Monday, November 28, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“Dear God. There's no safe way to approach Swift, who is English Literature's porcupine and poker, all fire and thorns and thinly-veiled disgust. "A Tale of a Tub" spends some of its time in horribly clever satire of Puritans and much of it in reactionary parodies of the rising professional class; along the way, though, Swift casually throws open the limits of human reason and the Enlightenment itself to question: a foreshadowing of the staggering "Gulliver's Travels". No, this isn't a treat. But it's certainly an experience.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Tuesday, November 22, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 0 stars

“In which we grow better acquainted with Sir Artegall, and witness both his exploits and the poet's growing discomfort with powerful women. Still, it's Britomart who must come running to the rescue when the Amazons capture Artegall and dress him up in skirts — which she, oddly, finds rather offensive than arousing. Along the way, we visit Isis Church, where the gods of ancient Egypt join the Roman and Celtic figures in Spenser's decidedly inventive brand of Christianity.”

Sir Magnus Ramping-Fumitory wrote this review Saturday, November 5, 2011. ( reply | permalink )