Stephen Dillane Books

The Cd begins with the powerful witches scene-great music-definitely causing my students to sit-up and listen.

The Dover Thrift Edition is a good choice for a reading text because it presents the entire, unabridged play, and has enough notes to be helpful to inexperienced readers without overwhelming or distracting them. The omition of a scholarly apparatus makes the Dover Edition more flexible and keeps it from becoming outdated.

This product was great. It helped my students and I read and comprehend Macbeth so much better than us trying to read it and comprehend it. The actors voices are great! I think they do a great job being the characters on tape!

Virtually all editions of Macbeth will have at least some annotations. Rummaging through five different editions, I preferred the Yale University Press version, edited by Burton Raffel, as having the most comprehensive and comprehensible notes, as well as an excellent introduction to Shakespeare's play. Raffel not only explains the meanings of obscure words, but also gives brief notes pertaining to relevant history, geography, stage directions, etc, that are rarely addressed as fully by other editors. In addition, Raffel frequently gives the proper way to stress the syllables in a line when reading it aloud, which can be extremely helpful. (However, in most places these stresses need to be very subtle, so that you don't sound like "taDUM taDUM taDUM".) And Yale's page layout is among the clearest that I've seen.

(To find this edition: at Avanced Search, enter ISBN 0300106548; or, enter Macbeth as title, and either Raffel as author or Yale as publisher.)

As a bonus, this edition includes at the back a long essay on the play by Harold Bloom. This is not an uninteresting commentary, but Bloom desperately needs a good editor. His essay is not only at least three times longer than it should be, but is startlingly repetitious. Yale would have been wise to have asked Bloom for a rewrite.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a dramatist whose genius is universally acknowledged, with a reputation as an actor, playwright and poet. He lived in an age of vast and significant changes characterised by the rise of the middle class and of a centralised government and the disappearance of medieval religious beliefs. England was transforming into a modern state. This was a time when self-realisation, self-respect and boldness of thought and action was idealised. Shakespeare's drama merely reflected the dramatic times of the age.

Shakespeare's genius can be reflected by the variety of his productions, where out of the 36 plays he has left, no two are alike and he managed to articulate the diverse subjects with exceptional expertise, handling both tragedies and comedies with ease.

Macbeth is a tragedy, intended to teach us a lesson about the human condition. The play is a tragedy about a wealthy Scottish noble called Macbeth who kills his king to gain the throne. During Shakespeare's time, this was a terrible thing to do, and from then on, Macbeth was doomed to die a tragic death.

The play starts with three witches confronting the great Scottish general Macbeth on his victorious return from a war between Scotland and Norway. The witches predict that he will one day become king. They also predict that another General called Banquo will be the father of kings, although he will not ascend the throne himself. The Scottish king, Duncan, decides that he will confer the title of the traitorous Cawdor on the heroic Macbeth. Macbeth, with the urging of his evil and ambitious wife murder King Duncan and ascends to the throne of Scotland.

Macbeth and his evil wife begin to do strange things, partly because of what they have done and also because they never get a whole night's sleep. Macbeth thinks he has to kill two of his former friends because he believes that they threaten his new throne. His efforts fail and he is eventually killed.

What frustrated and disappointed me was Robert Harlands sloppiness. Harland, a former British spy, was suspicious from the get yet kept making careless stupid mistakes over and over. That, after the first two, was inexcusable, imho. His sloppiness caused his sons death which reeeeally pissed me off cuz I liked Tomas Rath and was looking forward to a whole book with him in it. Grrrrr. Other than that I enjoyed reading this book and am looking into reading his 'Brandenburg Gate'. 'Empire State' sounds stupid so will skip it. Also will skip 'Remembrance Day' after reading the Publishers Weekly and Chris Fogarty's review.

I must agree with some of the other reviewers that this one is good, not great. Parts of it are too implausible, and other parts dragged on way too long. Halfway through I had to put the book down for a few months and regain my strength before finishing. It was only pure perseverance, not enthusiasm, that made me finish it. The end was actually well done, but it took far too long to get there.

However I do not read an espionage genre on regular basis, more exactly - I read it very rarely, this book has got me totally. Thrilling from the very first paragraph it has consumed my entire weekend. I simply could not leave it and let it be a bed-side reading. I have picked it randomly from a box of english books I have received from someone leaving my country back to the US and every other book I have picked up afterwards was a pure disappointment in a comparision with this one.
The plot is great and refreshing, the style is dynamic and the construciton of book is thirilling. Beside being an enormously convincing post cold-war espionage book, I have appreciated the job the author has done as for the local specifics described in book. As long as I come from on of the countries the book takes place in and as long as these central-european countries are usually described in a ridiculous, far from reality way, Mr. Porter has bothered himself to do a research, to check the probability of local names and places (authors, when writing about the post-communist countries often tend to name their heroes Boris and Yelena, forcing them to live in towns sounding like in XY-kovo and let them standing all their days in the queues to get a bread and potatoes, thinking that giving the contex a typical russian coherency of the 70ties spices the book with the sprinkle of authenticity) and together with the plot he has made the book so persuasive I have started to look over my shoulder to check whether or not I'm being observed by a spy.
But first and foremost he has convinced me the espionage genre (and the espionage itself) has not died with the end of a cold war.

Spy's Life is a very enjoyable espionage thriller. Robert Harland, a former British spy, begins the novel by surviving a plane crash only to realize that this is the least of his worries. Key events in this spy's life have come back to haunt him and now he is not only fighting for his life, but the lives of his loved ones. Great political intrigue, I especially liked the use of the United Nations in the novel.

Can't wait for the sequel 'Empire State'.

A very good spy story with lots of twists and turns, a love story and the up turning of an unknown son. There is lots of shooting and death for those with a bloody bent and an airplane crash that is the centre of a sabotage investigation. The plot line centres on the competition amongst spy organizations in different countries in the investigation by the UN of an ethnic cleansing burial site in the former Yugoslavia. A nice twist at the end, a believable protagonist in Robert Copeland and a ruthless sadistic enemy that stretches Copeland's many talents.

While I enjoyed most of the book the last 100 pages tended to drag and the involvement of the various good and bad guys got very complex. 3.5/5

Were Remembrance Day simply a thriller I would rate it five stars. It is fast-paced and some neat science is woven into a suspenseful plot. Its deadly pyrotechnics and interesting locales suggest that its targeted market is viewers rather than readers.
Its great defect is in its misrepresentation of the Anglo-Irish conflict. It assumes that the reader is fully disinformed by Brit propaganda. In reality, Ireland's 834 years of Brit rule has been one long genocide varying only in its intensity. Liz I, Cromwell and Victoria each murdered more than half of Ireland's population. The author presents ex-IRA-man Lindow as an ex-terrorist. He depicts Lindow's Irish mother as evil to the extent that she is a patriot. As antitoxins to such gross propaganda buy Ten Men Dead or Eye-Witness Bloody Sunday or (Sutton's) Index of Deaths From the Conflict in Ireland. Author Porter is refuted by the official murder record. For example; wwwdotterrorismirelanddotcom shows that, of the 173 child-murders in this post-1969 phase, 20 were by Irish forces; 153 by Brit forces - the actual terrorists.

In this debut novel, Henry Porter provides the grist of more seasoned spy thriller authors: a plausible and twisted plot, a worthy villain, protagonists with real-life depth and flaws, and scenes rich in detail in the Clancy or Ludlum tradition. The self-serving hypocrisy of government agencies becomes the villain's arch angel, as often occurs in real life tragedies such as 9/11. The only thing that prevented a dreadful tragedy in this novel was the tenacity of the detective who was determined to solve the crime on his beat no matter what, a woman's belief in the system she worked for became greater than her personal ambitions, and the victim of police "profiling"-- if your mother is a terrorist, you are automatically a terrorist. A stunning first novel and an absorbing read. Porter joins my growing list of favorite spy thriller writers. I now look forward to reading Porter's next novel, "A Spy's Life."

This is one of those all too rare occurences: a truly great first novel in the thriller/suspense, etc. field. Here, Henry Porter proves that there is rich ore to be mined in the post-Cold War, post-Northern Ireland era. While the "Troubles" are an essetial part of the plot's background, the story is driven by a set of fascinating characters. In fact, Commander Kenneth Foyle of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Unit is a prime candidate for a series. Wathcing Foyle take hold of the case even against the wishes of his own service and the active enmity of the Security Service is an interesting story in itself as we watch the Security Service implode from its own intrigues and attempts to impede the main investigation into the bombing that killed Lindow's brother and implicated Lindow only because the authorities were protecting themselves from other revalations.

Kirsty Lainge of the Security Service is an especially interesting character, although in some ways it did seem obvious what stance she would ultimately take and what the outcome would be for her. The question of Mary's relationship to all this is answered early but the fate of one of the injured bystanders is an interesting twist at the end. In fact, the last line of the book was very appropriate.

I look forward to "A Spy's Life" with an assurance, from reading the reviews, that Henry Porter has not faded much, if at all, from his first effort. "Remembrance Day" is simply a great read and highly recommended.

Remembrance Day is a truly remarkable first novel. There is a depth and richness in plot and characterization not often seen in first time writers. The plot is intricate enough to keep readers happily and compulsively turning the pages. However, a problem with the book is the needless repetition of explanations from one character to another. This serves to slow the book down considerably and adds to the already overblown length. Nonetheless, it remains a compelling thriller and an excellent summer read. Larry Gandle Tampa, FL

A good tale, well told. Well-developed characters are set in an intriguing plot, with a nice balance between procedural detail, descriptive material, and suspense.

Unfortunately the lack of proof-reading [at least in the US, Simon & Schuster edition] results in innumerable typographical errors, which were extremely distracting and spoilt the reading pleasure.

Had the publisher made any effort in this regard, I would have awarded 4 stars.

I hope that Mr. Porter will write more books of this ilk, and that he will take note of this deficiency. END