A writer at his masterful best

THE CLASSICS In the first of a short series in which he examines enduring tales, Micheal Fanning gets to grips with an epic of the Spanish civil war By MICHAEL FANNING Sunday October 25 2009 Ernest Hemingway THIS is a Penguin edition of 444 pages I read over four to six weeks. I read the last 250 pages within a 24-hour period in Co Galway, the final 100 pages while I sat in Thoor Ballylee Park, Yeats' tranquil four-storey Norman castle where he settled with his wife, George, near Gort, Co Galway. For Whom The Bell Tolls is Hemingway's masterful work -- a story of war and its cruelties, of rape, murder, men and women at their best and worst, of cowardice and of bravery. It is also an examination of love, true love, suicide and death. Hemingway employs gripping dialogue in the vernacular language in telling this fantastic,... [read full story]                    

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