Search Results

“... been recruited by cults. The novel takes the form of a long journal-letter to her ‘Dear Kids, Grand-kids, In-Laws, Cousins, Assorted Genetic Riff-raff and so on’. Among other good things, familial homicide offers Pentecostal liberations. In The History of Luminous Motion the young hero would seem to be clinically autistic. But desire for his remote ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... cent.The John Matthews of the poem ends up with a sentence of 15 years. Norma Kitson’s husband, David Kitson, was sentenced to 20 years for work connected with the early days of the ANC. Like Dulcie, she was a hundred per cent behind him and remained so. Her spirit is unquenchable, even if she is something like the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a long trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, a woman turns up on the last page, out of the blue, and says: ‘The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time ...”

“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”

“... nowhere in particular. If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased ...”

“... It goes to show how trying to please the Royal Academy could make an artist lose contact with the grand tradition. Perhaps there are a handful of great Constables among the finished set-pieces – and if there are, one of them is A Boat Passing a Dock, his Diploma work – but by and large this exhibition seems to me to be saying that we have been right about ...”

“... of printed works, paintings and engravings. For instance, she makes much of the fact that while David’s great 1785 work The Oath of the Horatii features three brothers taking an oath in front of their father, a 1793 engraving depicting an oath-taking by three revolutionary soldiers shows no father, only a fallen comrade. The comparison perfectly ...”

“... have us believe, by the nubile females of Tahiti, but by sodomy and sexual sado-masochism; the Grand Tour was less a pursuit of foreign culture than of foreign boys, not palazzi but ragazzi even the loss of the American colonies was in part attributable to the fact, alleged by Rousseau, that the commander of the British forces was gay. Although Felicity ...”

“... interviews, Muldoon is not unlike that other cryptographer, Raymond Roussel, who, fearing that his grand schemes would go unappreciated by posterity, told all in Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres. If the puzzles in Muldoon’s work were exhaustible simply by noticing puns like Accutane/Aquitaine, reading him would indeed be as unrewarding as his ...”

“... sings no more.’ For the rest of his life there was intermittent talk of another oratorio, of a grand opera, of a piano concerto, and of a third symphony: but nothing significant emerged. Honours continued to cascade: the Mastership of the King’s Musick, two more knighthoods and a baronetcy (although not the sought-after peerage). But now they were ...”