Search Results

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... for all Jünger’s intelligence, from a conceptual currency debased by moral idiocy. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Foreword to The Dear Purchase, when this monograph appeared one of Stern’s older colleagues told him: ‘If you want to get on, do not write this sort of thing again.’ Stern, Boyle adds, ‘was incensed. He continued writing, and, in ...”

“... sympathiser who seems to have regarded Asian exploration as a proving ground for the superman; Nicholas Roerich, the artist and barmy quester after the fabled hidden city of Shambhala; and many others. Evidently, the book is loosely focused and some of the figures whose lives Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac chronicle were in no sense protagonists in the ...”

“... making possible TR’s preferred location for the Canal, Morris calls attention to a request from Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University, for a list of Roosevelt’s favourite books. Segments devoted to the tense drama unfolding in Washington and the Caribbean alternate with bibliographies that display TR’s extraordinary ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in terms of philosophical sophistication and scholarly meticulousness it is a much weightier proposition. Griffin is a philosophy professor at McMaster and was one of the ...”

“... by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income from royalties, has a protagonist, Archbishop Thomas Becket, who shares his first name with Eliot. In 1934 the name-loving Eliot went to some trouble to import to the Faber offices in Russell Square a nameplate that had belonged to one of his grandfathers – ‘T. Stearns’ – and had it ‘put up on the ...”

“... We found no reason whatsoever to believe Summerlin’s results to be valid. When Dr Lewis Thomas, at that time President of the entire Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, passed through one day, we told him of our findings, upon learning which he looked very grave and clearly resolved in his mind to take some action. At the next meeting of the ...”

“... cantata, suffers by comparison with Britten’s Spring Symphony, which set some of the same Thomas Nashe poetry a decade and a half later; and while the comparison may be unfair, it is revealing. Britten’s genius lay in the precise capture of verbal imagery and sonority in striking musical ideas. Sequence and balance mattered more to him than ...”

“... love of 16th-century miniatures that had led him, as a schoolboy, to make drawings in the style of Nicholas Hilliard. He was interested not only in the paintings but the dress, jewellery and rituals of the age. Such interests were not encouraged at university. At this point the habit he had developed of working hard and in isolation stood him in good stead. In ...”

“... Order around 1223 and spent most of his long academic career between Paris and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas was his star student. Even then, the university was no ivory tower. Faculty had to deal with heresy charges, censorship by overreaching bishops, rivalry between friars and secular masters, and drunken brawls among students – who could matriculate ...”

“... in Argentina. The horrors of the ‘dirty war’ were no secret to inquiring Americans. Professor Thomas Franck, in a chapter headed ‘The Strategic Role of Legal Principles’, argues that Britain rallied the support of many UN states by invoking concepts of law and morality. To disregard the Argentine takeover, these countries were warned, would be ...”

“... these. He was born in 1572 to a strongly Catholic family. His mother was a great-granddaughter of Thomas More’s sister, and it seems that she kept More’s skull among her personal effects until the end of her life. His father was a Catholic and an ironmonger, but it would be wrong to think of him as a merry blacksmith who sold nails by the pound: he was a ...”

“... books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious literary texts worth reading, forms of energetic ‘creativity and rhetorical complexity’ for which, perhaps counterintuitively, we have the ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”