‘The Iron Man’: A Children’s Story in Five Nights is made up of five chapters, the story was designed to be read to children over five nights but unfortunately I was unable to follow this routine and as a result the story was read in less than an hour. Each chapter ended with a climax, ‘how far h...
I haven't read this book's classic prequel, 'The Iron Man', so any comparisons I have are from the fantastic 1999 Disney film adaptation, 'The Iron Giant'. With that film's focus on friendship blooming out of a shared feeling of otherness and how that clashes with the paranoid Cold War backdrop o...
Art is its own end, some would say, and so authorial intentions become irrelevant in any hermeneutic endeavor. I do agree that killing off the author sets open myriad interpretative possibilities—the text becomes the reader’s; meaning could be sought in any vestige of the written word; the autono...
This volume of Ted Hughes’s ‘creation’ stories was first published in 1963, and has now been published in paperback with a bright modern cover.There are eleven stories averaging eight pages each and each story tells of how and why a particular animal behaves as it does.The volume opens with the s...
Mrs Hagen, negotiating the grass-verge, drives out past them without a glance. Hagen’s man is holding a tall bay mare by a snaffle. Hagen, leaning his chest against a steel gate, watches the slender sooty stallion descending from its horsebox, on powerful springs, restrain...
But one was rusty-red, with a thick tail, neat legs, and black pricking ears, while the other was just plain shaggy black and white. They were both rivals for the job of guarding Man’s farm from the other animals. The shaggy black and white one was called Foursquare, and h...
The Iron Man allowed himself to be taken to pieces, arms, legs, body, head, all separate, so each part could be flown out to Australia on a different airliner. He was too big to be flown out in one piece. At the same time a ship sailed from China, loaded with great iron gi...