Dunkerley's

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HARD FACTS
Howard Spring
' The first volume of a trilogy from the 'eighties until the present day. The setting is the author's own Manchester, which he depicts so well that the reader feels that he knows the city inside out, from gaslit main thoroughfare to murky back alley. Dan Dunkerley and Alec Dillworth, starting their weekly paper, Hard Facts, that is to succeed so astonishingly, are real Mancunians. It is good to think we are to meet them again/ The Daily Telegraph
4 Hard Facts is the name of a Manchester-born weekly, selling over a millión a week by the end of its first year (1886). From printer's boy to proprietor's chair is the scaffolding of this növel. One of Mr. Howard Spring's accomplishments is that of teliing a story well and having plenty of story, coloured with a little melodrama, to teli. Another is that of making his characters stand out clearly, not necessarily because they are particularly alive or even lifelike, but because he has the caricature's eye for... Tovább

Fülszöveg

HARD FACTS
Howard Spring
' The first volume of a trilogy from the 'eighties until the present day. The setting is the author's own Manchester, which he depicts so well that the reader feels that he knows the city inside out, from gaslit main thoroughfare to murky back alley. Dan Dunkerley and Alec Dillworth, starting their weekly paper, Hard Facts, that is to succeed so astonishingly, are real Mancunians. It is good to think we are to meet them again/ The Daily Telegraph
4 Hard Facts is the name of a Manchester-born weekly, selling over a millión a week by the end of its first year (1886). From printer's boy to proprietor's chair is the scaffolding of this növel. One of Mr. Howard Spring's accomplishments is that of teliing a story well and having plenty of story, coloured with a little melodrama, to teli. Another is that of making his characters stand out clearly, not necessarily because they are particularly alive or even lifelike, but because he has the caricature's eye for any striking feature and his lines are always bold and firm/ Time and Tide
' Set in the Manchester of the 'eighties, Mr. Howard Spring's new növel works a sketch of the new popular journalism of the time into a brisk, varied piece of narrative invention. Hard Facts is the title of a weekly paper largely given up to odds and ends of miscellaneous information started by a young jobbing printer, Dániel Dunkerley, who is of the energetic, thrusting kind and whose efforts are rewarded by a circulation of a millión within a few months. Mr. Spring, in experienced fashion, draws into the scene the frime and the high teas of Manchester, and he has a practised way alsó with Mancunian
dialect and manners generally.' The Times Literary Supplement
¦
continued on back wing
As in its forerunner Hard Facts, so in this present növel the chief characters are Alec Dillworth and his sister Elsie. The scene has left Manchester (save for a fleeting and fatal moment) and moves between London, Sussex and Cornwall. Hard Facts gave us the story of Elsie's tragic love affair; this book shows her happily married. The emphasis shifts to Aiec's love for Hesba Lewison, a contributor to the magaziné Dunkerley s which he now edits. It is a love doomed from the start, and the exploration of its course is the exploration of Alec Dillworth himself: brilliant, way-ward, adventurous yet fearful. Fear-ful above all of his own past; and when this materialises in the person of his father, the swing of the story towards its fatal conclusion deepens and accelerates. In this book we see the last of Alec Dillworth, but we meet new people who have yet to play their parts in the unfolding of the story which began with Hard Facts. Hard Facts has already been translated into most European languages.
continued from wrapper back
' I know of no one with a better knowledge of Manchester than Mr. Spring. Certainly no one with greater power of turning that knowledge into gripping reading material. His prose is vivid and colourful, but restrained by a meticulous choice of words and a constant tautening sentence. Hard Facts, in itself a complete növel, is the first book of a trilogy planned by Howard Spring to embrace the period from 1885 to the present day. Get it and read it—a fine, sensitive növel.'
The Sunday Graphic
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