Search Results

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... cohort of young historians of the Soviet Union trained at Columbia in the 1990s who, influenced by Stephen Kotkin, first brought Foucault to Soviet history. Psychologists, specialists in forensic medicine and statisticians – all those in Russia who studied the phenomenon of suicide in the first decade of the 20th century – complained of the lack of state ...”

“... true. ‘Pastime with good company: but where’s the company now? It’s cringing against the wall.’ The recurrence of Henry’s song goes along with some artful thoughts about the relationship between manuscript poetry and the relatively new medium of print. Ballads about the king and Anne are printed, and the king insists that their author should be ...”

“... the infamous, often unsung verse suggesting that all property is theft: There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn’t say nothing; This land was made for you and me. And so an angry song of protest and a hymn to trespass became part of a celebration of the American ...”

“... suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ‘essential liberty’ for ‘a little temporary safety’. According ...”

“... curtly dismissed by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that Wright, having edited ...”

“... Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom literary. I solicited ...”

“... who seem determined to repeal the New Deal; the anti-immigrant extremists Peter Brimelow and Stephen Miller; climate change deniers; adherents of gun culture; and Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who has blamed increased toleration of gay men and lesbians for the supposed moral decay of Western civilisation (channelling Pat ...”

“... the bend in the river, a shape that gives purpose to an inadequately defined horizon. On the wall of the pub is a map of the area from the pre-Dome period: a Guide to the Thames (by Catamaran Cruises). This improved landscape cuts directly from the Royal Naval College to the Thames Barrier, so that the peninsula is not merely occulted, it doesn’t ...”

“... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...”

“... zebra on a wooden plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in ...”

“... get the idea.’ You get the idea. In a play this would count as breaking the fourth wall, but such effects are much more powerful in the theatre, where three walls have actually been provided. In fiction any impression of solidity is a sandcastle built jointly by writer and reader, easily kicked over by either party. Wilful underminings are ...”

“... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris ...”

“... were brought up in Burlingame, a suburb which she skewered in her novel The Road through the Wall (1948), peopling it with near indistinguishable snobs and bullies. The first book, she would tell her own children, is your revenge on your parents: once it’s out of your system you can get on with the real writing. When Jackson was a teenager, they moved ...”