Search Results

“... most of them clothed in traditional sharwal khameez and jaunty turbans. ‘Now and then,’ Robert Byron wrote in 1933, ‘a calico beehive with a window at the top flits across the scene. This is a woman.’ Contemporary Kabul is closer to Byron’s description than to a 1977 guidebook’s city of ‘mini-skirted ...”

“... plagiarism in the year 2000, Brazilian literature, Victorian myth-making, lesbian studies, Byron, Middleton, Melville, Stevens, Conrad, Woolf and Dante. In a sobering session on ‘Free Speech and Hate Speech in the Classroom’, a professor at New York’s LaGuardia Community College explained how she handles such student editorialising as ‘Jews are ...”

“... form. When Earthly Powers was passed over for the Booker Prize in favour of the first volume of William Golding’s seafaring trilogy, the choice was between a ‘serious’ work, which time may or may not agree to be a masterpiece, and a light novel on a heroic scale, which seems careless of posterity although not of its immediate deserts, as Burgess ...”

“... symbols are too ‘handy’.) America has a prestigious tradition of such cultural semiologists. William Carlos Williams’s sifting of the American grain (‘to discover the NEW WORLD ... what it has done to us, its quality, its weight, its prophets, its – horrible temper’), H.L. Mencken’s jocular scrutiny of the American language, Edmund Wilson’s ...”

“... as she might well write today. She was always exasperated with the devious Hyndman, and with William Morris – ‘a fine old chap’ – and Bax when they wavered towards Anarchism. ‘Bax, reasonable on many points, is quite mad on others.’ In the earlier pages family affairs are the staple. Of the two parents, one figures, as Sheila Rowbotham ...”

“... new novel. They include Max Raymond, a melancholy saxophonist looking for a vision of God; Byron Egan, a preacher and ex-biker, tattooed on the cheek with a Maltese cross and given to injecting himself with holy water at the pulpit; Melanie Wooten, a beautiful widow in her seventies whose affair with the local sheriff elicits varying degrees of ...”

“... checking – she didn’t. For the earliest verified usage, we have to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have ...”

“... Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited ...”

“... poetical courage, dare their readers to be that cynical student in the back row, to be Byron or Shelley giggling as the old goat of Grasmere goes bleating on. In ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ you can hear exactly what J.K. Stephens meant when he said that Wordsworth had two ...”

“... Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published. From the mid-Eighties mountainous illness surrounded Edward, from which he nonetheless retrieved the last big works: Customs in Common (1991), which traced a disappearing culture back over ground ...”

“... often homely precision and clarity into an equal precision of dream-like beauty and melancholy. Byron’s interest was much more local, centring on the incestuous figures and the guilty lovers. Guilt meant nothing to Shelley, but to the Scotch Calvinist latent in Byron it meant a great deal, and in his translation of the ...”

“... Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’, Byron’s ‘Darkness’). One of the ways of investigating long-ago eruptions is by looking at the density of sulphate deposits buried deep under the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The ice core data also show evidence of a colossal (vei 6) eruption six years ...”

“... works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to denigrate such work as being Orientalist, it’s difficult to find anything in ...”

“... heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing generosity of taste. With poetry ...”

“... lifetime tenure, and sometimes that is a literal description: the ultra-conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on the job in 2005 at the age of eighty, and so did his ideological ally Antonin Scalia in 2016, aged 79. More recently, the court’s indefatigable liberal standard-bearer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died in post aged 87, a mere six and a half ...”