Word: julians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surprisingly, these qualities can be found in the character of Julian Ramsay, narrator and groping intelligence of Incline Our Hearts. Born in London with the coming of World War II, he is orphaned by German bombs and sent to Norfolk to be raised by his Aunt Deirdre and Uncle Roy, a local vicar. Rounding out the rectory household is Felicity, a laconic and inaptly named teenage cousin, who leaves her room long enough to be impregnated and abandoned by Raphael Hunter, scholar-scoundrel and the novel's sinister presence...
These are the central players in what evolves from a surface entertainment into a deceptively rich and complex novel about coming of age (if not about the age itself). Julian's story brims with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later, while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's essential lessons...
...Novelist Julian Barnes has described Potter as a "Christian socialist with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust." And Potter's works have provoked disgust in the more easily shockable segments of the British public. The tabloid press denounced the Detective series as pornography, and as Potter recalls, "one Member of Parliament got up on his hind legs and said that he'd counted the number of swear words and bare bums. But that's partly because television is taken more seriously in England, which means more seriously by the fools as well." One scene -- a flashback of a desperate encounter...
...decision last month to abandon the fight against Iraq and pursue a cease-fire. No matter when peace is finally achieved, the use of chemical weapons will remain a lasting legacy of the war, and its consequences will be debated by the international community for years to come. Says Julian Robinson, an expert on chemical weapons at the University of Sussex: "The cork is out of the bottle...
Probably the hardest kind of crime novel to write is the exploration of the criminal mind from within, the stream of psychotic consciousness brought to its peak in past years by Julian Symons (The Players and the Game) and Ruth Rendell (Live Flesh). That sort of book has been attempted unsuccessfully this season by Robert B. Parker, whose uninsightful Crimson Joy (Delacorte; 211 pages; $16.95) suggests that he would do better to return to slam-bang action. Symons and Rendell, meanwhile, are represented by more conventional fare resurrecting characters from some of their earlier novels...