Voyages through vanities

Gulliver’s New Travels: Lemuel Gulliver Collides with the 21st Century Guy Walker, self-published, 2022, 140pp, £4.99 DEREK TURNER is entertained by a clever updating of a classic Satire, often thought of today as a liberal genre, can also be a conservative art. Any writing that relies for its comical or scourging effects upon the discrepancies…

A VOYAGE to OBVERSIA

LEMUEL GULLIVER continues to indite his extraordinary adventures to GUY WALKER WARNING : THIS TEXT FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CONTAINS DISCRIMINATORY LANGUAGE Before Dawn we heaved Anchor and steered to the West in our Passage to the West-Indies but, for four Days, we were driven by a violent Storm eastwards towards the…

Escaping from reality – ‘The French Dispatch’

GUY WALKER greatly enjoys a playful new film, but finds it ultimately insubstantial Early on in The French Dispatch we encounter an imprisoned murderer who takes the art world by storm with an abstract nude painting of a female prison officer, with whom he manages to conduct an affair, secretly painted in his French prison.…

The closing down of History

Credit: Shutterstock GUY WALKER calls for a realistic view of humanity’s record Earlier this year a Palace coup at the National Trust saw the Chairman, Tim Parker, helpfully defenestrate himself before the pursuing Imperial Guard did it for him. The revolting soldiery were later in hot pursuit, through the gilded corridors, of the Director-General, Hilary…

Of course a man can imagine what it’s like to be a woman!

GUY WALKER says we must be allowed to imagine opposites Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Lydgate, Edward Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda are excellent examples of well-rounded and believable male literary inventions, with a variety of qualities of character. Portia, Beatrice, Miranda, and Viola are excellent examples of brave, intelligent, and virtuous women, while…

Two poems by Guy Walker

Guy Walker is a French and Italian teacher who lives on the south coast of England. He edits the magazine https://www.british-intelligence.co.uk/ and blogs at https://roseatetern.blogspot.com/ Spleen by Charles Baudelaire - English Verse Translation I have a thousand years of memories.A chest of drawers rammed full of elegies, Of served writs, billets doux and balance sheets, Romances, heavy plaits rolled in…

Seen and unseen – horrors of the Holodomor

The Last Road, by Nina Marchenko Mr Jones, 2019, directed by Agnieszka Holland GUY WALKER admires an overdue film about a usually ignored atrocity This film deals with a real event – the ‘discovery’ and reporting by a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, of the Holodomor (man-made starvation) which took place in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-3.…