It was, of course, a little boy's fantasy of winning his mother to himself, and replacing the father who could not give her the things she wanted -- a classical oedipal fantasy if you like -- but if it were only this the story would be banal.

He would not have cared why it emerged, he only wanted to capture a memory to play with it again in his imagination and somehow to fix and hold in the story the disturbing emotions that accompanied the fantasy.

Perhaps it is only an analogy, but one of the most obvious differences between cheap fiction and fiction of an enduring quality is the development of a theme or story with leisure and anticipation.

The complexities of Venetian politics eluded him, but the story of the revolution itself is told in restrained measures, with no superfluous passages and only an occasional overemphasis of the part played by its leading figure.

Sherman was responsible for the story when he said in his memoirs that this was the only time he could recall seeing Thomas ride so fast.

The trouble with all these doctrinal quarrels is that we hear only one side of the story: what, in the secret councils of the Kremlin, Molotov had really proposed, we just don't know, and he has had no chance to reply.

You then descended one story, glommed a television set from the music room -- the only constructive feature of your visit, by the way -- and, returning to the ground floor, entered the master bedroom.

We have only to think of Lady Macbeth or the policeman-murderer in Thomas Burke's famous story, `` The Hands Of Mr. Ottermole '', to realize that hands often call up ideas of crime and punishment.

:" To this day Harold is not quite sure what made him suddenly pour out the whole story to a little man to whom he had only spoken a few minutes before.

In the short story The Chocolate Box ( 1923 ) Poirot provides Captain Arthur Hastings with an account of what he considers to be his only failure.

* In one version of the story of the birth of Achilles, Thetis anoints the infant with ambrosia and passes the child through the fire to make him immortal but Peleus, appalled, stops her, leaving only his heel unimmortalised ( Argonautica 4. 869-879 ).

Some scholars contend that the most ancient and genuine story told of only four sons of Aeolus: Sisyphus, Athamas, Cretheus, and Salmoneus, as the representatives of the four main branches of the Aeolic race.

Alan Cameron states: " It is only in modern times that people have taken the Atlantis story seriously ; no one did so in antiquity ".

In any case, the necklace given to Beowulf in the story is not the Brísingamen itself ; it is only being compared to it.

According to this view, the story of Jacob's visit to Laban to obtain a wife originated as a metaphor for this migration, with the property and family which were gained from Laban representing the gains of the Joseph tribes by the time they returned from Egypt ; according to textual scholars, the Jahwist version of the Laban narrative only mentions the Joseph tribes, and Rachel, and does not mention the other tribal matriarchs whatsoever.

Alice Munro has a unique place in Booker Prize history ; The Beggar Maid is the only short story collection to have been shortlisted, doing so in 1980.

In the 20th century, one of the most influential plays, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's ( 1928 ) The Threepenny Opera was a reworking of The Beggar's Opera, setting a similar story with the same characters, and containing much of the same satirical bite, but only using one tune from the original.

The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

In novels such as The City and the Stars and the story " The Sentinel " ( upon which 2001: A Space Odyssey was based ) Clarke presents ultra-advanced technologies developed by hyperintelligences limited only by fundamental science.

This is a frequent occurrence in sitcoms, where networks may agree to continue a show, but only if a certain character is emphasized, leading other minor characters to become victims of Chuck Cunningham Syndrome, while the emphasized character ( usually a Breakout Character ) ( as in the case of Frasier Crane ) develops a more complete back story that ignores previous, more simplified back stories.

The first episode in that book deals with the story of Glaucus and Scylla, in which the enamoured sea-god seeks a love filtre to win Scylla's love, only to have the sorceress fall in love with him.

Cerberus featured in many prominent works of Greek and Roman literature, most famously in Virgil's Aeneid, Peisandros of Rhodes ' epic poem the Labours of Hercules, the story of Orpheus in Plato's Symposium, and in Homer's Iliad, which is the only known reference to one of Heracles ' labours which first appeared in a literary source.

Howard never gave a strict height or weight for Conan in a story, only describing him in loose terms like " giant " and " massive ".

A story is told of a miracle whereby they were partially successful: Knowing that they could not smuggle her whole body out of Rome, they decided to take only her head which they placed in a bag.

The author Julian Symons has commented on writers who see this as a detective story, arguing that " those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles " and that these puzzles are not detective stories.

Willard Thorp, in his new book, American Writing In The Twentieth Century, observes, quite validly it seems: `` Certain subjects are conspicuously absent or have been only lightly touched.

And so I would only touch upon it now ( much as I have long wanted to write a book about it ).

Understanding, as he did, the difficulty of the art of poetry, and believing that the `` only technical criticism worth having in poetry is that of poets '', he felt obliged to insist upon his duty to be hard to please when it came to the review of a book of verse.

Since the great flood of these dystopias has appeared only in the last twelve years, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the chief impetus was the 1949 publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, an assumption which is supported by the frequent echoes of such details as Room 101, along with education by conditioning from Brave New World, a book to which science-fiction writers may well have returned with new interest after reading the more powerful Orwell dystopia.

The work as it stands is not the entire book that Malraux wrote at that time -- it is only the first section of a three-part novel called La Lutte avec l'Ange ; ;

Investors breathed more freely when it was learned that this acrobatic dancer had turned magician and was only doing a best seller book to make some dough.

most modern adapters totally accept the world of a book, squeeze it dry of life, and add only one contribution of their own: stage technique.

Since this book is concerned only incidentally with railroad rates, it will not attempt to analyze the methods by which the staff of the Interstate Commerce Commission has estimated out-of-pocket costs and apportioned residue costs.

Sir Julian Huxley in his book Uniqueness Of Man makes the novel point that just as man is unique in being the only animal which requires a long period of infancy and childhood under family protection, so is he the only animal who has a long period after the decline of his procreativity.

The outcome of such an experiment has been in due time the acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God inspired in a sense utterly different from any merely human book, and with it the acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God, Son of Man by the Virgin Mary, the Saviour of the world.

Look in this book for weak mortals and only on occasion for virtues and vices on the heroic scale.

Not content to create only the music and lyrics, Noel Coward also wrote the book and directed Sail Away ( Capitol WAO 1643 ; ;

This is not only a compliment to Mijbil, of whom there are a fine series of photographs and drawings in the book, but to the author who has catalogued the saga of a frightened otter cub's journey by plane from Iraq to London, then by train ( where he lay curled in the wash basin playing with the water tap ) to Camusfearna, with affectionate detail.

This slim book, while giving the reader only a fleeting glimpse of the scientific mind confronting the universe, has the appeal that informed conversation always has.

William Sansom writes only about Europe in this book and frequently of such familiar places as London, Vienna, the French Riviera and the Norwegian fjords.

One looked forward to Mr. Remarque's ninth book if only because not even a reasonably good novel has yet been written grounded on automobile racing, as dramatic a sport as mankind has devised.

The large amount of travel done by Christie and Mallowan has not only made for a great writing theme, as shown in her famous novel: The Murder on the Orient Express, but also tied into the idea of archaeology as an adventure that has become so important in today ’ s popular culture as described by Cornelius Holtorf in his book Archaeology is a Brand.

" Near the end of his life, he fictionalized this experience in his book New Connecticut, originally circulated only among friends before its publication in 1881.

Carroll ultimately replaced this scene in the book with the Caucus race, as he felt that it would only have been funny to the people familiar with the incident.

" The book has come down to us in two manuscripts only.

The last section of the book ( 7: 1 to 9: 8 ), commonly referred to as the Book of Visions, contains the only narrative section.

Anaxagoras wrote a book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived, through preservation in work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the sixth century AD.

While the complete title of the book is the Acts of the Apostles, really the book focuses on only two men: The Apostle Peter ( chs.