Farrer denied that Austen's artistry was unconscious (contradicting James) and described her as a writer of intense concentration and a severe critic of her society, "radiant and remorseless", "dispassionate yet pitiless", with "the steely quality, the incurable rigor of her judgment".
Four weeks ago, I drove past Crich Tower, in remorseless rain, with my parents, and immediately felt overcome.
i) The culturally dominant strain of English novel has for years been what Zadie Smith called "lyrical realism": the remorseless prioritisation, with apologies for repeating my favourite heuristic, of recognition over estrangement.
The film (which is available on a fine Universal DVD released in 2004) begins in a seedy San Francisco hotel room with Raven caressing a stray kitten and then slapping down the chambermaid who has foolishly tried to throw the cat out — establishing in one brief scene a character largely unseen in American movies before: a remorseless killer with charm and sex appeal.
In Joshua Oppenheimer's formally staggering documentary, the anti-communist genocide that took the lives of up to 2.5 million people in 1960s Indonesia is daringly addressed by interviewing the executors rather than the survivors, using ghastly re-enactments to confront these remorseless killers with the impact of their deeds.
"There is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other," writes Jameson in Marxism and Form.
Yet it is also, in its way, a story dedicated to a plain, and even remorseless, realism, with a harsh truth to impart that the teller cannot evade, any more than children ever get to opt easily out of the given landscapes in which they find themselves.
Young Bond author Charlie Higson finds Red Grant to be "a very modern villain: the relentless, remorseless psycho with the cold dead eyes of a 'drowned man'".
Urwand sharpens his indictment with remorseless intent, if not with any detectable sense of humour.
