The Siege of Trencher's Farm complex examination of modern-day masculinity and liberal values." "Slant Magazine" found that "Much of the novel's prose reads like a screenplay, with tedious descriptions of props, settings, and physical actions ... tension only really matters if you identify with the characters and care about their predicament, which I found too implausible, fantastic, and crudely sketched to do so." Legal scholar Melanie Williams wrote of how the 1971 film had coloured reception of the book: "The book is now republished by Bloomsbury (2003), with the title "Straw Dogs". This seems particularly sad given that past critical commentary on the book has
The Gladiators (novel) 65BC to explore the search for the just city, the inevitable compromises of revolution, the conflict of ends and means, the question of whether and when it is justifiable to sacrifice lives for an abstract ideal." The novel is generally not as well-known to English-speaking audiences as the later American novel on this topic, "Spartacus" (1951), by Howard Fast, a bestseller adapted for Stanley Kubrick's award-winning 1960 film of the same name, which reached wide audiences and stimulated sales of Fast's novel. The Gladiators (novel) The Gladiators (1939) is the first novel by the author Arthur Koestler; it portrays the