Search Results

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”

“... of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac. Almost, but not yet. Michael Beschloss’s absorbing and authoritative study of US-Soviet relations from January 1961 until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 adds significantly to the case amassed by the demolition squad. Like many US authors, Beschloss assumes that his ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”

“... Marchioness of Londonderry, refer not to her, but to Frances Anne, while Walter Long appears as Robert. The Chartwell Papers are continually cited for quotations which appear in full in the Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert companion volumes, or even in the main volumes themselves. This unhelpful practice has been made positively misleading, since, for a ...”

“... with their scripts. It was probably a mistake to employ stars like Al Pacino (Revolution) and Robert de Niro (The Mission): they are not only expensive in themselves, they make everything else expensive, since nothing around them can be cheap. It was certainly a mistake for Goldcrest to get so deep into television, out of which it made only losses. This ...”

“... of Gaddis’s jokes are pretty broad – even broader than the above, like the name of the actor Robert Bredford, or the career of one Clint Westwood and his film A Hatful of Sh*t – and there is one long argument about the follies of organised religion that feels as if Gaddis, and not his characters, were indulging a bee in a bonnet. But the ingenuity and ...”

“... be homeless in New York.’ The chaplain from Catch-22 reappears, his name strangely changed from Robert Oliver Shipman to Albert Taylor Tappman, but complete with a close to verbatim quotation from the earlier book about his fantasies of the harm that could come to his family. He is still helpless and well-meaning. Here as in Catch-22, ‘immoral logic ...”

“... opens with the appearance on the Spokane reservation of a thin old black man who calls himself Robert Johnson – presumably the great Thirties bluesman, long dead in the world outside Alexei’s fiction. Here he’s in flight from someone called ‘The Gentleman’, with whom he has done a deal that would make him the best guitar-player the world had ever ...”

“... He is accompanied by his wife, here called Lili, their cat, Bébert, and an actor friend called Robert le Vigan. They leave Paris, stay in Baden-Baden, where a large group of people who have reasons for not wanting to be at home are having a manic non-stop party. The attempt to assassinate Hitler echoes there like a terminal dream: ‘Nothing to be ...”

“... Other club members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ...”

“... have missed on previous occasions. Two of her Partisan Review essays – on the cancellation of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 and on a Beat poets’ reading at Columbia in 1958 – stand out for me in this respect. Like a good liberal – ‘I was against both communism and McCarthyism. They were enemies of each other, but I was the ...”

“... ancient sources contradict one another on the details of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was ...”

“... insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by writing’. Robert Bresson said much the same thing: ‘Cinema is not a spectacle. It’s a kind of writing.’ There is a wonderful, casual-seeming evocation of this thought in Daney’s essay from 1969 on Pasolini’s Teorema. He says we know what the desert at the end of ...”

“... aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the ...”