On Beauty

Howard Belsey, Kiki's husband, an art historian and college lecturer, hates the works of the 17th century Dutch painter Rembrandt. In fact, he has been working on a book for a long time called...

Kiki is clearly a dynamic character in this novel as she obviously changes and develops during the course of the novel as a result of firstly her husband's infidelity and secondly her friendship...

Integral to the character of Howard Belsey and to his fall from grace is his self-belief that he is as passé as his projector. From this, you might say that Howard is the Failure type of character....

The title of this updated version of E. M. Forster's Howard's End seems to indicate that the novel will have more in common with an academic essay based on some abstract concepts rather than an...

The main conflict in this updated version of Howards End is an external conflict that exists between the two families, the Belseys and the Kippses, which takes the form of differing political...

Howard is shown to have impacted his marriage irrevocably for the worst by his infidelity with one of his colleagues. When Kiki discovers the identity of his mistress, she makes it clear that their...

I have managed to find a chart that gives a very comprehensive comparison and contrast between these two works of literature, and I have included a link to it below, along with links to the enotes...

This is an interesting question. I can see how "only connect" and "do concentrate" might be a representative pair of phrases to give a metaphysical and symbolic representation of Zadie Smith's On...

Zadie Smith is an English novelist with a Jamaican mother and English father, who was raised in London, graduated from Cambridge University, held a post-graduate fellowship at Harvard, and has...

This is an interesting question. I think it might be argued that if the plot of On Beauty were to change--as long as the characters were not also changed--the impact of the book would not be lost...

I would want to answer this question by examining the character of Kiki in this excellent novel, who is shown to be one of the major characters who changes and develops during the course of the...

This text makes it completely clear that Kiki loves her children completely and unquestionably. Even when they do things to exasperate her or when they do things that are illegal, as she suspects...

Zora ... [didn't] feel the part; [so] she dressed it instead. How successful this had been she couldn't say. Now she stopped to examine herself in the window of Lorelie's ... Zora is a...