Search Results

“... a kind of contract. From Socrates on, there has run through the European tradition the notion of a sharp division, amounting often to a conflict, between reason and emotion, in which reason must prevail as the core of our being and the prime seat of value. It has often been dramatised with the rebellious emotions figuring as animals. Kant made fully explicit ...”

“... banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, is named in honour of Sir Stephen Redgrave. After hacking through brambles, picking a path around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey block of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts ...”

“... of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of ...”

“... but she was a hissing goose. While her judgments may not always be acute, they are almost always sharp. Of Mary Curzon, for example: ‘The latter a very good type of decorative West End furniture – beautiful, silly, idle, and wonderfully, amazingly dull; always saying she is a fool and never minding it; never getting accustomed to her beauty, therefore ...”

“... There are some nice bits of furniture but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round, then beat a quick retreat. I drive back over upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely ...”

“... The Portrait of a Lady already urges us to think of Isabel Archer ‘as an Emersonian Becky Sharp’ who chooses to marry a parody of Emerson’s transcendentalist, and only then sees her error. The seed of all Poirier is in one prophetic paragraph that exalts American literary nationalism: The connection between James and Emerson is worth attention ...”

“... his ability to be disconcerting and outrageous, his uneasy sexual consciousness – and his sharp eye for the failure of all socialised modes of behaviour and moral pretension. The disconcerting vitality, the touches of mystery, the bawdry, edginess and common sense are all imitated by Pilkington, as well as recorded by her. Swift is the reason the ...”

“... stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots ...”

“... close to the head, with tight frizzes of ginger or auburn hair showing at the edges. The face is sharp and pale, the gaze challenging, the nose prominent, the mouth small, the lips bright red. In her left hand she holds a small book – probably a prayer book. She is a very stylish widow, if not a merry one. It is no great surprise to find the soi-disant ...”

“... strands in the Labour movement. Some, such as William Adamson, Vernon Hartshorn, Thomas Shaw and Stephen Walsh, were trade union moderates; others, like Fred Jowett and John Wheatley, were socialists from the Independent Labour Party (ILP) strongholds of West Yorkshire and Clydeside. In addition, there were the Fabian intellectuals Sydney Olivier and Sidney ...”

“... behind it in her story. The Rise of the People’s Bank of China, by the political scientists Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, looks at how institutional change happens in a society with no place for overt political competition. It also conveys far greater anxiety than Yueh’s book about the urgent need for rapid change. At the end of their book, Bell and Feng ...”

“... as if quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction ...”

“... in March 1998, the application still awaited final approval from the Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers. (Poor man. It was going to get worse, much worse. Byers epitomised the New Labour attitude of glinting defiance; fiercely tonsured and spectacled, tight-lipped, scorched by flashbulbs in the passenger seat of a ministerial limo, assaulted by furry ...”

“... from the confusing tariff of one oligopolistic supplier to another doesn’t protect them from sharp, unpredictable swings in prices. In overseas chanceries the Thatcher doctrine came up against ambitious leaders who were no less patriotic, but not so arrogant and naive. Unlike Thatcher, they didn’t assume that if their country levelled its playing ...”

“... don’t think it is what I like, really – though I certainly admire Lowell’s.Bishop is pretty sharp so far as the influences go. I don’t see much of Stevens, though Berryman read and admired him a great deal (‘better than us; less wide’, he wrote in a eulogy for Stevens, ‘Dream Song 219’). Certainly Pound, whom Berryman not only admired but was ...”