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The Hot Gates and other occasional pieces
A dazzling collection of occasional writings by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist on subjects ranging from Thermopylae to the English Channel, and from Coral Island to Jules Verne.
'A book of occasional essays which afford us many fascinating insights into Golding the man . . .It is highly individual yet profoundly modest; it has an unusual, slightly angular candour, full of painful knowledge and a beautiful humanity . . . event the slightest piece bears the mark of his rare, austere mind, his remarkable imagination . . . Even these occasional essays are enough to remind us that . . . there is not, at the moment, a writer to touch him.' New Society
'A book of occasional essays which afford us many fascinating insights into Golding the man . . .It is highly individual yet profoundly modest; it has an unusual, slightly angular candour, full of painful knowledge and a beautiful humanity . . . event the slightest piece bears the mark of his rare, austere mind, his remarkable imagination . . . Even these occasional essays are enough to remind us that . . . there is not, at the moment, a writer to touch him.' New Society
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
William Golding
153 books4,710 followersSir William Gerald Golding was an Engish novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 5, 2020
3.5 stars
My first encounter with Sir William Golding happened in some bookshops selling mostly new English paperbacks and some hardcovers half a century ago during my college years. Not being aware of his fame nor having studied him in any English course, I casually browsed some of his titles reading a few paragraphs and left them on the shelf; I usually thought I would never read him since his writing style and words in his narratives and dialogs were a bit hard to understand and so it was hopeless to enjoy his works. However, during my sophomore year I recalled our class watched a black-and-white film entitled Lord of the Flies kindly presented, on a supplementary basis, by our English teacher, Mr Tony Kidd. He might have borrowed it from the British Council in Bangkok; there were no English subtitles so we did our best to follow the story kindly briefed by him before the presentation. Coming to think of it, I can't help but feel a bit envious of present-day students whose modern IT including the Internet can academically help them, especially, in this case via YouTube video presentations of innumerable titles of famous English classics.
Eventually, during my early years of teaching in a college I told myself it's time to start reading the novel due to my film-watching background. I simply kept reading off and on, feeling bitter with dubious enjoyment; a reason was that I hadn't read its synopsis, studied his style and known his life before. I have since had my own respect and admiration to this formidable novelist and, of course, my jubilation when the Oslo committee awarded him as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. I think I'd find time to reread the novel again and see if I can better understand or more appreciate.
"The Hot Gates" taken from the first title followed by his six 'occasional pieces' under the topic of People and Places did not interest me at first sight; I wondered what sort of 'pieces' he has written on the topics of Books, Westward Look, and Caught In a Bush. According to his text, he's revealed "The Hot Gates" called as such due to "the hot springs that bubble out of the cliff where the road is narrowest, so that the Greeks call it the Hot Gates" (p. 14) The place in question concerns with an ancient time, 480 B.C., and the Persian Army invading Greece had been held there. Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans waited to hold the pass; Xerxes, King of Kings, wondered what happened so he sent a scout who returned to report that "They were bathing in the sulphur springs and combing their hair." (p. 18)
To continue ...
My first encounter with Sir William Golding happened in some bookshops selling mostly new English paperbacks and some hardcovers half a century ago during my college years. Not being aware of his fame nor having studied him in any English course, I casually browsed some of his titles reading a few paragraphs and left them on the shelf; I usually thought I would never read him since his writing style and words in his narratives and dialogs were a bit hard to understand and so it was hopeless to enjoy his works. However, during my sophomore year I recalled our class watched a black-and-white film entitled Lord of the Flies kindly presented, on a supplementary basis, by our English teacher, Mr Tony Kidd. He might have borrowed it from the British Council in Bangkok; there were no English subtitles so we did our best to follow the story kindly briefed by him before the presentation. Coming to think of it, I can't help but feel a bit envious of present-day students whose modern IT including the Internet can academically help them, especially, in this case via YouTube video presentations of innumerable titles of famous English classics.
Eventually, during my early years of teaching in a college I told myself it's time to start reading the novel due to my film-watching background. I simply kept reading off and on, feeling bitter with dubious enjoyment; a reason was that I hadn't read its synopsis, studied his style and known his life before. I have since had my own respect and admiration to this formidable novelist and, of course, my jubilation when the Oslo committee awarded him as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. I think I'd find time to reread the novel again and see if I can better understand or more appreciate.
"The Hot Gates" taken from the first title followed by his six 'occasional pieces' under the topic of People and Places did not interest me at first sight; I wondered what sort of 'pieces' he has written on the topics of Books, Westward Look, and Caught In a Bush. According to his text, he's revealed "The Hot Gates" called as such due to "the hot springs that bubble out of the cliff where the road is narrowest, so that the Greeks call it the Hot Gates" (p. 14) The place in question concerns with an ancient time, 480 B.C., and the Persian Army invading Greece had been held there. Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans waited to hold the pass; Xerxes, King of Kings, wondered what happened so he sent a scout who returned to report that "They were bathing in the sulphur springs and combing their hair." (p. 18)
To continue ...
August 31, 2018
I love his piece about Thermopylae, and his speculation that maybe, just maybe, Leonidas and his 300 knew they were dying in order to buy Greece the time they needed to organize their armies and defeat Xerxes. I hope so.
January 29, 2015
This is a mixed collection of essays and reviews written by Golding at various periods through his life. They offer readers some insights into the man who wrote the novels set in every school syllabus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and who was established in his lifetime as a Great Writer. It's especially interesting to read these pieces in conjunction with his daughter Judy's tender memoir, "The Children Of Lovers."
Golding does not always present a very appealing picture of himself, especially in the essays about his tours of America, grouped under the heading, "A Westward Look." For such a great-minded writer, he can appear oddly naive. He finds his American hosts ignorant and shallow, and does not scruple to say so. The black men he comes across say "Yassuh!" The women are trivial bores -- fluttering socialites or fawning air hostesses. The female students he lectures to are incapable of understanding the meaning of literature. To keep them at a top college, he notes with astonishment, "costs £1000 a year." Despite this, he suspects that "40% get married before completing their courses." Even in the 1980s, these were surely outdated attitudes?
The title-piece is about a visit to Thermopylae, "The Hot Gates." In her memoir, Judy Golding describes this as part of a happy family holiday, Golding père et mère and the two children roaming Greece in a rented car and sharing impressions. In Golding's essay, the other 3 vanish. There is only "I." The family discussions become Golding's thoughts alone. Their words become his, their reactions are sucked into his reported experience. Everything is subsumed into the godlike ego of the author. No impression of the heroism of Leonidas comes through, or indeed of anything except an intensely subjective meditation on self.
Perhaps this solipsism is a necessary part of the focus an author needs. However, from Judy we learn also that around this time, Golding was breaking his wife's heart with affairs, while his son and daughter were both going through early nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, and there is clearly a darker undercurrent to his self-absorption which Golding is at pains to conceal from the reader.
What rescues the collection, and restores Golding's stature, is the final essay, "The Ladder And The Tree," which describes his childhood terrors, his relationship with his father, and his struggles at school. Here, at last, we are given a riveting glimpse of Golding's early driving forces, which might have come out of one of his novels. It is a beautiful, powerful piece of writing, and for this one alone, the book is well worth buying.
Golding does not always present a very appealing picture of himself, especially in the essays about his tours of America, grouped under the heading, "A Westward Look." For such a great-minded writer, he can appear oddly naive. He finds his American hosts ignorant and shallow, and does not scruple to say so. The black men he comes across say "Yassuh!" The women are trivial bores -- fluttering socialites or fawning air hostesses. The female students he lectures to are incapable of understanding the meaning of literature. To keep them at a top college, he notes with astonishment, "costs £1000 a year." Despite this, he suspects that "40% get married before completing their courses." Even in the 1980s, these were surely outdated attitudes?
The title-piece is about a visit to Thermopylae, "The Hot Gates." In her memoir, Judy Golding describes this as part of a happy family holiday, Golding père et mère and the two children roaming Greece in a rented car and sharing impressions. In Golding's essay, the other 3 vanish. There is only "I." The family discussions become Golding's thoughts alone. Their words become his, their reactions are sucked into his reported experience. Everything is subsumed into the godlike ego of the author. No impression of the heroism of Leonidas comes through, or indeed of anything except an intensely subjective meditation on self.
Perhaps this solipsism is a necessary part of the focus an author needs. However, from Judy we learn also that around this time, Golding was breaking his wife's heart with affairs, while his son and daughter were both going through early nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, and there is clearly a darker undercurrent to his self-absorption which Golding is at pains to conceal from the reader.
What rescues the collection, and restores Golding's stature, is the final essay, "The Ladder And The Tree," which describes his childhood terrors, his relationship with his father, and his struggles at school. Here, at last, we are given a riveting glimpse of Golding's early driving forces, which might have come out of one of his novels. It is a beautiful, powerful piece of writing, and for this one alone, the book is well worth buying.
December 4, 2007
I only intended to read th first essay but I couldn't put this collection down!
"What chance has literature of competing with the defined categories of entertainment which are laid on for them at every hour of the day?...But just as bad money drives out good so inferior culture drives out superior. With any capacity to make value judgments vitiated or underdeveloped, what mass future is there, then, for poetry, for belleslettres, for real fearlessness in the theatre, for the novel which tries to look at life anew, in a word, for intransigence?"
"What chance has literature of competing with the defined categories of entertainment which are laid on for them at every hour of the day?...But just as bad money drives out good so inferior culture drives out superior. With any capacity to make value judgments vitiated or underdeveloped, what mass future is there, then, for poetry, for belleslettres, for real fearlessness in the theatre, for the novel which tries to look at life anew, in a word, for intransigence?"
August 19, 2012
I couldn't put this book down. It is a fabulous collection of essays and Golding is now one of my favourite authors. Thee essays tell a lot about him as a person, and much of what he narrated helped me put Lord of the Flies into better perspective. It's a must read for those who love travelling, reading and digging up the past (literally.)
May 27, 2025
After reading Lord of the Flies for the first time this year, I found this essay collection by its author tucked away in a bookshop & eagerly grabbed it. These were a delight. It spans from Thermopylae to the tree he read novels in as a boy.
The Hot Gates: "I knew now that something real happened here. It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all argument to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of the violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood in the right line of history."
Copernicus: "In Pythagoras, religion, mathematics and poetry meet."
The English Channel: "We watched the gale comb mist from the tormented water and drag it away like smoke from a burning city; and minute by minute, symbol of man's knowledge and impotence, the lighthouse sent a succession of spokes of light that swung, probed the turmoil and then flinched away as if appalled by what they saw."
Shakespeare's Birthplace: "his precious legacy to us...can be nothing more than the moved experience of his poetry."
Digging for Pictures (my favorite): "Gold dies in a museum despite all you can do. All the gold that Schliemann dug up at Troy looks no better than tinsel, under glass...Just as the gold of Troy has lost gloss, so a bone or a stone dies a few moments after you lift it from the earth."
"Perhaps it is not so good an idea to try to penetrate the temporal boundaries and identify yourself with people without first knowing what sort of people they are."
Egypt from My Inside: (staring into the eyes of a sarcophagus) "They outstare infinity in eternity...Whatever the Egyptians intended, they brought life and death together in the most tangible way possible."
Fable (on Lord of the Flies): "I included a Christ-figure in my fable...Simon...He is really turning a part of the jungle into a church."
Astronaut by Gaslight: "(Verne) remains the only French writer to get his hero right round the world without meeting more than one woman."
The Glass Door: "Like all women students, they are inveterate, comically obsessive note-takers, who hope by this method to avoid the sheer agony of having to think for themselves."
The Ladder and the Tree: "There is in a tree...that which is most precious to a small boy; an unvisited place, never seen before, never touched by the hand of man."
The Hot Gates: "I knew now that something real happened here. It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all argument to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of the violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood in the right line of history."
Copernicus: "In Pythagoras, religion, mathematics and poetry meet."
The English Channel: "We watched the gale comb mist from the tormented water and drag it away like smoke from a burning city; and minute by minute, symbol of man's knowledge and impotence, the lighthouse sent a succession of spokes of light that swung, probed the turmoil and then flinched away as if appalled by what they saw."
Shakespeare's Birthplace: "his precious legacy to us...can be nothing more than the moved experience of his poetry."
Digging for Pictures (my favorite): "Gold dies in a museum despite all you can do. All the gold that Schliemann dug up at Troy looks no better than tinsel, under glass...Just as the gold of Troy has lost gloss, so a bone or a stone dies a few moments after you lift it from the earth."
"Perhaps it is not so good an idea to try to penetrate the temporal boundaries and identify yourself with people without first knowing what sort of people they are."
Egypt from My Inside: (staring into the eyes of a sarcophagus) "They outstare infinity in eternity...Whatever the Egyptians intended, they brought life and death together in the most tangible way possible."
Fable (on Lord of the Flies): "I included a Christ-figure in my fable...Simon...He is really turning a part of the jungle into a church."
Astronaut by Gaslight: "(Verne) remains the only French writer to get his hero right round the world without meeting more than one woman."
The Glass Door: "Like all women students, they are inveterate, comically obsessive note-takers, who hope by this method to avoid the sheer agony of having to think for themselves."
The Ladder and the Tree: "There is in a tree...that which is most precious to a small boy; an unvisited place, never seen before, never touched by the hand of man."
December 20, 2017
I wrote a review and emailed it to my cockmail, but thanks to school filters I cannot access it right now so I will add my review(s) here later. One things for sure, I've decided to give this collection of essays 4.78/5 stars for being excellent, the only reasons for my deductions are because there were one or two essays that were pretty pointless in the grand vision of all things. But now I know more about William Golding, the educated man, the typical, generous, normie, man, more than I ever have before.
Bravo!
Bravo!
January 15, 2020
One of the most quotable collections of essays ever written. I connected very deeply with many of his sentiments, especially his valuation of aesthetics above cold scientific precision. His voice is/was one which is sorely needed these days, one which curbs against inhumanity of modernism/postmodernism in a witty way. He makes common life experiences (especially from childhood) insightful and even remarkable. I'm very glad I found this at a garage sale last year.
February 3, 2023
Every single one of these short essays and reviews by the master writer William Golding is worth reading, though not all are equally memorable or important. However, his short biography of Copernicus is one of the most thought-provoking and insightful pieces I have ever read about the early scientist, and is worth the price of admission alone.
February 7, 2023
A terrific little collection covering a whole load of different subjects. Subtitling it ‘occasional pieces’ really is deceptively modest. The collection’s themed on the importance of the imagination with each essay using imagination in some way. Hugely quotable and with some subtle language expressing subtle ideas, in words that needs to be read twice to appreciate or understand.
February 5, 2025
A collection of shorter non-fiction by the Writer of the Lord of the Flies, interesting by their variety and all capably written, although some are more memorable than others. The best piece is the titular story on Golding’s visit to Thermopylae, where the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks turned the West into the West.
February 11, 2023
Wasn't expecting that. Simply a great read. Fun, insightful, filled with knowledge.
So well written. And still relevant and quite up to date, even though it's older than myself:-)
Only negative is how rare {and somewhat expensive) it is from used book sellers here on mainland Europe.
So well written. And still relevant and quite up to date, even though it's older than myself:-)
Only negative is how rare {and somewhat expensive) it is from used book sellers here on mainland Europe.
October 29, 2025
Teenage me thought these short stories where just ok, including Billy the Kid
December 31, 2014
It is hard to make a random collection of musings interesting and I am afraid this one didn't quite do it for me. Too many of the pieces landed clear purpose or were basically about travel. I did enjoy one part where it went into some of his background thinking of Lord of the Flies which I had very much enjoyed reading and his motives behind it were undressing. While I have heard it several times before I also enjoyed his thoughts on the devaluing of education into mere training. The short story Billy the Kid was also enjoyable to read. Unfortunately beyond these three I didn't find much in the book of interest.
June 8, 2014
I have to admit that I'm not a fan of random musings and essay collections. They all feel like strained anecdotes that aren't that interesting. This is mostly the same sadly. I love Golding but this was a tough read. I liked the chapter where he discussed Lord of the Flies and he had the story of 300 (Leonardis) in the title story...but not much else. There was a tale of crossing the Channel and a few other bits and bobs that were far too long. I don't think I will bother with anymore of these as it's not my bag...
July 8, 2011
A small book containting a beautiful set of reflections on the Battle of Thermopolyea.
January 4, 2013
Good, narrative interesting, separate articles, sometimes there is a spark in the narrative
December 31, 2017
Enjoyed the People and Places and Books (especially On the Crest of the Wave) sections better than Westward Look and Caught in a Bush.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews