Search Results

“... from an underground labyrinth full of sepulchres. A centaur levels his arrow at a drowning man. A green devil with six bat’s wings and three gaping mouths clutches a pair of grimacing people. A horned figure labelled ‘Cerbero’, with cloven hooves, swollen balls and blood dripping from his lower jaw, forces two naked people to cower and topple. The ...”

“... standing and composure, among the glazed Sixties façades and yellow-plastered walls with dark green shutters. It doesn’t tower, it’s quietly massy. As we stand looking at it, a man in jeans with cropped bleached hair grins at us, points at his own teeth, and says Quella molare! Is this the local nickname for the Moore? From closer up some nearly human ...”

“... in their homeland. One of the lawyers for the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof gang) is now a Green member of the German parliament, another is the notably illiberal interior minister, a third is Gerhard Schroeder. (In the 1970s, Schroeder defended Horst Mahler, who had himself acted for RAF members and is now a supporter of the far right NDP.) Ulrike ...”

“... Paton Walsh decided to publish the novel in Britain herself, using her small personal imprint of Green Bay Books, and backed up with marketing and distribution by Colt Books of Cambridge, who initially approached HMC to handle the account. Joint Managing Director Julia Hobsbawm says: ‘The book presented us with an unmissable PR challenge: to get attention ...”

“... or grew potatoes or oats on them. It’s a hot, sunny July day, very peaceful in the grove’s green shade. I look out over the Gweebarra Estuary, its shoal of little grassy islands, cows grazing on the roshin – a delta-shaped peninsula with a long thin sandy isthmus. It’s a place I’ve known since early childhood: mysterious and very beautiful, like ...”

“... thought this was going to be a joke?’ I’ll spare you the details of the one about what is green, hangs on the wall, and plays the violin. These jokes are not funny, just mildly desperate. Except that of course desperation is funny too, if you tell it right. The Coen Brothers’ new movie, A Serious Man, contains several jokes of this kind, and is such ...”

“... before 1939. And then there was Pollock. He didn’t invent the drip and pour technique (he joined David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in 1936, in which unconventional techniques such as pouring pigment were being investigated) but he certainly made it his own in the works by which we substantially know him. Between 1943, when Peggy Guggenheim ...”

“... rabbit roaming the living room, the roughness of the paint marks and the lurid colours (the lime green of the girl’s jumper, the wild purple and pink of the background) undercut any sense of conventional portraiture. The sofa seems to be suspended in mid-air, dissolving into the wall. The pleats on the girl’s skirt and the stripes on the boy’s jacket ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”

“... as much as the technologically advanced designs: clearly the practice wants to be seen as both green and clean, which, apart from the real benefits, is good public relations for all involved. A further attraction is that the copious glass in a typical ‘Foster’ design suggests a ‘transparency’ that might be associated with the political or ...”

“... Union, but her independent – and extreme – militancy caused a breach. In the words of David Mitchell, a biographer of Christabel Pankhurst, she became ‘an incorrigible freelance’. In the summer of 1913, newsreel cameras captured her running across the course of the most popular race of the year, the Epsom Derby, falling under a horse and lying ...”

“... only the occasional phrase of what was being said on the summit, staring at the hillsides red and green with the dwarfish growth of Arctic summer. His All Holiness Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople and spiritual head of the Orthodox Churches of the world, had come to Greenland on his seventh Symposium voyage, repeating his call to humanity ...”

“... 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between Brondesbury and Kilburn Station and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders ...”

“... David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level, ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”