Sean O'Connor (1)

A very interesting look at a case that really dominated the British landscape in the years coming up to the Second World War. Much more than just an account of a legal phenomenon, this is an analysis of how a truly tragic event can affect not only the people involve, but those are around them. Once again, Sean O’Connor shows real Passion flare when it comes to bringing these characters and societal more of the time to life. Anyone that’s interested in the 1930s, the British dominions, and society precious will enjoy this.… (mehr)

I stumbled across this book, and am really pleased to have read it, although on so many levels the story is upsetting. I came to it fresh, completely ignorant of the people and events. The book is an illuminating account of the shocking end of a celebrated Canadian architect. Francis Rattenbury, which the author sets within the context of local and global events. The central event is a murder in the seaside town of Bournemouth, but this is misleading, the book ranging far and wide, moving back and forth across the Atlantic - rootlessness, migration and exile may indeed be components of the unfolding tragedies, along with the horrors of war, the challenges of talent and temperament, the imbalances of power, to say nothing of passion as both a creative and destructive force. Every now and then I had to stop reading to digest the latest revelation. O'Connor brings to mind Oscar Wilde's observation that "the truth is rarely pure and never simple,". On a personal note, when visiting British Columbia some years ago I had taken photos of the grand buildings of Victoria, unaware that they were the work of Rattenbury; fairly early in my reading I therefore realised his creations were familiar to me. A bit later came what I can only describe as a shock: this was the realisation that as a young man my late father had been friendly with one of the secondary characters in the story, not only that, but they had first met in 1935, the year of both the murder and the trial. This was something he had never mentioned to his children.… (mehr)

A group of essays on the "distinct, if overlapping, theatrical worlds created in the first half of the twentieth century by the British playwrights Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, and of their complex, shared debts to Oscar Wilde."

Faced with societal and legal restrictions on what could be said and produced on stage (until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain's approval was required for any play to be publicly presented in England), gay playwrights had to find subtle and subversive strategies for writing about their lives. O'Connor analyzes the work of four of the most prominent and influential of these men in great detail, and discusses how the plays (and, in some cases, films based upon the play) resonate for gay men.

"I might just as well come out about this now as later: I never tire of watching Brief Encounter. There, I've said it. Part of its appeal to me is my own very ambivalent attitude to it, for it seems to me to represent all the most attractive and most repellent aspects of English culture. It promotes on the one hand a nostalgic world of decency and niceness, suffused by the comforts of home, and on the other a repressed, class-ridden culture suffocated by its own nostalgia and characterized by emotional sterility and quiet self-sacrifice. I'm also aware of the 'deadly respectability' of the film's reputation and that in defending it I'll probably be condemned as a secret wearer of cardigans, slippers, brushed-cotton pyjamas and God knows what other horrors." Me, too.

Be warned, though: you'll be renting a lot of movies!… (mehr)