Search Results

“... dark. The rubies move: they are better, they are beetles.When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine precipice, by ...”

“... on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James ...”

“... variant of Alfred Rosenberg and company; and the more genteel version of Gymnasium graduates like Martin Schede, the chief Nazi archaeologist, who didn’t subscribe to any Nordic-Greek theory and thought of themselves merely as adding Greek grace-notes to the German triumph. Hitler was closer to the second group. He called Rosenberg ‘a narrow-minded Baltic ...”

“... by John Maxwell, or the vulgar publisher William Tinsley’s Tinsley’s Magazine, in which Thomas Hardy had his first success with the serial of A Pair of Blue Eyes. (Houghton’s explanation for not indexing these three journals is revealing: ‘they consist primarily of fiction, and fiction seems sufficiently represented.’) At times, the Index’s ...”

“... to be his natural allies we have to understand something of Finley’s background. Whether or not Martin Jay is correct in The Dialectical Imagination in crediting the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung with such an influential part in the revitalisation of Marxism in the Thirties and Forties through the development of what they called Critical Theory ...”

“... on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both ...”

“... Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our ...”

“... are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ On the other hand, decaying flesh could transmit the holiness of the soul it once sheltered through contact relics. Dirt from a grave, water in which a saint had been washed for burial, straw from his bed, or ...”

“... in her choices of heroes and heroines, all solitary, intrepid, self-determining figures – Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, Vladimir Nabokov – and it is most eloquently displayed in her essay on Melville’s Bartleby. As in her last volume of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, which had among its female victims and survivors a very persuasive account of ...”

“... is. ‘While he all but rubs epaulets with some fairly impressive revolutionaries, Bolivar and San Martin among them, Balthasar’s overriding desire during his ten-year campaign is to get his hands on the Marquise’s perfectly formed buttocks. This at times seems absurd, reductive and in any case a reworking of something Fuentes did in The Old Gringo and ...”

“... a member of the Hellfire Club and for his involvement in the editing and publishing of his friend Thomas Potter’s poem An Essay on Woman, which succeeded in lowering the tone even of pornography. Cash told the full story of that poem in ‘An Essay on Woman’ by John Wilkes and Thomas Potter (2001) and does not rehearse ...”

“... the tidiness and neatness of argument that we normally admire in a work of scholarship. Like Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, it takes the form of a list: there is one set of names and places after another, with no subordination to a grand theme or decisive conclusion. We don’t even know for sure the number of those who left Germany after 1933, let ...”

“... that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive.Martin Amis, MoneyWell, they keep trying. Look here upon this picture, and on this. Both are unsigned 17th-century portraits, one depicting a man, the other a child. The man is an affable-looking chap, reminiscent of Phil Hopkins, a percussionist at the repro ...”

“... at the same time an investigation of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘attunement’, the second of Martin Buber’s concept of ‘meeting’. About Bieber-Buber (‘alternative spellings of the same German surname’), Smith takes the singer’s objectifying fame as the most extreme instance of the difficulty we all must face in meeting the world. ‘All real ...”

“... comes not from anti-clericalism but from piety: he goes to Mass at peril of his life, but in Martin Parker’s 1632 ballad, ‘A True Tale of Robin Hood’, his post-Reformation fervour leads him occasionally to castrate clergymen. His loyalty goes straight to the top; his enemy is the corrupt middle man. In order to maintain Robin as the hero of ...”