Word: reader
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...easier to write poetry than it is to write fiction, but probably harder to write good poetry than to write good fiction. The effort involved in scribbling down a few lines of mediocre verse is minimal, far less than that required for even a very short story. The reader feels, at times, that Melville realized this, and let a metrical scheme and a lot of cheap rhymes do his work for him, Witness...
...small part of the Allingham charm is her chariness with detail. Where Sayers gorges the reader with information about Lord Peter's mulish family and elegant tastes, Allingham drops only a few facts per book. In Police at the Funeral, for instance, the reader learns that Mr. Campion loathes and suppresses his Christian name, Rudolph, which makes it all the more astonishing to discover-eleven books later-that he has called his own son Rupert. Gradually, too, as the series progresses, a caste of semiregulars assembles: the policemen Gates and Luke, the trouble-prone Faraday clan, Sister Val. Perhaps...
...permanently disqualified for peace, he is a soul as devastated as a Russian battlefield and he knows it. He concludes: "I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition"-an elitist in defeat as he surely would have been in victory. But to his reader, this Sajer, doomed to survival, may be as moving an argument against war as all the corpses he unflinchingly bears witness...
Much of this strikes the contemporary reader as anachronistic and worse. Thirty years after the Battle of Britain, enemy pilots see each other as blips on radarscopes, and they do not tip their caps. Yet some things have not changed, certainly not for the better. The villains of Townsend's book are the villains of the most modern war saga: politicians...
...recognize that she and Margaret are soul mates. Few crises cannot be better met if the house is filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. In the end, Margaret affirms the reality of her existence in another pregnancy-man's eternal solution to fear of mortality. The reader rejoices that unto them a child will be born-and unto Margaret, a whole new set of ego building fantasies...