Search Results

“... Prejudice’, a phrase used by the elderly poet to describe anti-Semitism in a conversation with Allen Ginsberg. Carpenter quotes from an 1892 newspaper report published when Pound was six and living in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, which mentions a local inn announcing that ‘hereafter no Jews will be taken to board there’; he also cites a Jenkintown ...”

“... golden age of faith before harmony was destroyed by Luther, or Voltaire, or Nietzsche, or Allen Ginsberg, and by secularists who posit an imaginary dark age of faith when all sleepwalked in credent superstition apart from a brave handful of questioners who usually ended up getting burned at the stake. There was no age, golden or dark, of general ...”

“... knowingly acting as a stooge for the oil industry. He is not alone. It is shocking to learn from George Monbiot’s book Heat just how systematic the oil lobby has been about spreading a smokescreen of doubt around the question of climate change. The techniques in play were learned by the tobacco lobby in the course of the fights over smoking and ...”

“... in 1929 and ran for 377 shows, was their real breakthrough. The brothers had joined forces with George S. Kaufman, a great wit and a cabaret writer of exquisite timing and pitch, and as might have been predicted, the solid support made them even bolder with improvisations. ‘I may be wrong,’ Kaufman was heard to say at a rehearsal, ‘but I think I just ...”

“... very good indeed. In The Kodak Mantra Diaries, Sinclair’s record of a film project based on Allen Ginsberg’s stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described ...”

“... his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to stand for election to the French National Assembly on the grounds that as long as women remained ‘under the tutelage and the dependency of a man’ they could not be free political agents, to the Roman popular tribune Angelo ...”

“... nationalist, not a communist, but the spectre of Soviet penetration alarmed Washington. In August, Allen Dulles cabled Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville, to say that Lumumba’s removal was ‘an urgent and prime objective’. A month later, Mobutu staged his first coup. Lumumba came under UN protection but he was a dead man ...”

“... economic matters could read his spirited attempts to convert Senator Bronson Cutting, Congressman George Tinkham and Senator William E. Borah to Poundian solutions to American policy issues: these were collected in volumes published in 1995, 1996 and 2001 respectively. His epistolary career began with this of 1895 to his mother, Isabel, who was visiting ...”

“... movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to younger students and I admired them. I was starting to like my Jimi Hendrix album after all: my unwitting ...”

“... in service of the priests, or that it will ever care, if it ever knows, any more than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. Like McGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in these letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom ...”

“... Kafka analyses in his letters or the limits and duties of the feminine role that preoccupy George Eliot in Middlemarch. Perhaps homosexuality is a non-subject – endlessly fertile, ceaselessly shifting, devoid of all stable content, an invitation to musing rather than a fixed object of enquiry. Genet wanted to write an entire book devoted to ...”

“... 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast pornographic poem, and about Eliot’s first marriage. I once heard J.B. Priestley explaining that the Eumenides in The Family Reunion ...”

“... When Southern boy Elvis first went north to do some fancy New York TV, the usually quite hep Steve Allen miscalculated badly and showcased him in a dreary, patronising skit in which Elvis has to deliver his song to an actual slobbery hound dog. You can feel the Northern condescension and snobbery thick like molasses in the studio air. For his second TV ...”

“... by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ...”

“... Maugham is Of Human Bondage. It’s easy to see why post-1918 adolescents – including George Orwell – thrilled as the scales fell from the eyes of Philip Carey, the club-footed but otherwise Maugham-like student hero: It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are ...”