Search Results

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”

“... childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest young boyish masters the world had ever seen. The critics concerned with modern children’s fiction tend to see the sought growth in terms of identity problems: sometimes, of course, class identity, and especially pride in a working-class or ethnic identity, while ...”

“... offenders, bad sorts and those convicted of odious crimes – servants who stole from their masters or aided thieves to break and enter, and those guilty of robbery with violence. In this way, the ‘old regime’ possessed a flexibility which allowed selective targeting. It was increasingly reckoned to be a blunt blade, however, on account of its ...”

“... Book of Fish what amounted to a new chapter miraculously appeared.’ Purportedly written by one William Buelow Gould, a 19th-century ‘recidivist convict artist’, the book contains a spiralling, multi-coloured text interspersed with paintings of fish. Sid is entranced by its ‘clandestine rainbow of tales’, and decides to investigate further. He finds ...”

“... about the same time a mural appeared in Somers Town, in which she figures, as well as her husband William Godwin, their daughter Mary Shelley, and a crowd of later locals which includes Dickens, who lived there as a child, though sadly not Hazlitt, whose Liber Amoris is set in Somers Town. The mural is the work of the artist Karen Gregory. It’s on the side ...”

“... dedicated to preserving the authority of the canon, and to parading a spectacular array of great masters and great masterpieces in a ‘pure’ space, cocooned from the gross, corrupt world of politics, ideology and social strife. Monographs and surveys are still published today in great numbers, of course; and there remain large parts of the discipline ...”

“... scheme, which, as he remarks, does not work well for the later part of life. But, as our masters are prone to ask these days, what is the utility and social significance of this project? As Burrow says, the various schemes give no good answers to someone who wants to know, for instance, at what age one became an adult. The schemes are traditional and ...”

“... on the American literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James ...”

“... benefits cheat.’ Alison ends up in prison. ‘The Winshaw Prize’ opens with a quote from William Cowper which reminds us that satire can be ‘either grave or gay’ – Number 11 is mostly grave – but goes on to bemoan satire’s ineffectiveness: ‘What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaim’d/By rigour? or whom laughed into ...”

“... by Italy’s new education minister to search the monasteries of the Marche and Umbria for Old Masters (although he managed to fall out with his fellow commissar, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, the author of a definitive history of painting in Italy). The countryside bristled with bandits, and recalcitrant priests, suspicious of the secular ...”

“... recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its ...”

“... expect from the author of Plateforme (2001), and a less expected enthusiasm for the writings of William Morris – becomes the victim of an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist ...”

“... methods of enquiry would allow at least some people to find out things for themselves. It was, William Harvey wrote, ‘base’ to ‘receive instructions from others’ comments without examination of the objects themselves, especially as the book of Nature lies so open and is so easy of consultation’. ‘Easy’, though, is the word we use to describe ...”

“... more than a page to the paramilitary group Tara, best-known for the links between its founder, William McGrath, and the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal. Although Tara has not been held responsible for terrorist outrages, many of the people who later became key figures in both the UDA and the UVF began their paramilitary careers there. The ...”

“... coveted and every altar required for consecration was treasure. Rulers cast their greedy eyes, as William of Malmesbury wrote in the 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or ...”