Search Results

“... undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through Christian Gauss, the dean of the college, an ...”

“... method. The monologue was Browning’s version of his wife’s poetic self-enjoyment. Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, and all the others, are the poet himself, enjoying himself, but by other and much more effective means. He and Elizabeth, alive or dead, remained wrapped up in themselves and in each other, in their books, their Greek, their pictures, their ...”

“... so free as its mythologists have contended, especially its modern ones. Today’s equivalent of Bishop Stubbs is the editor of the Daily Telegraph, relentlessly committed to a view of Britishness that does not account for Scotland, a view of Ireland that excludes Ulster, and a view of England that, regardless of history, depicts it as a place on which any ...”

“... it was just something that Europe happened to muddle into. Allied intellectuals agreed with Henry James, for whom the war was a ‘bleak and hideous tragedy’ that would ‘undo everything’: German ones were more likely to welcome it, whether as a long-desired reunion of ‘might and mind’ (Thomas Mann) or quite simply, as for Rilke, ‘a god at ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who lived ...”

“... Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of ...”

“... Some of the best buildings are those which record pure Yankee ingenuity: the Octagon Barn of the James L. and Cora Purdy Farm, for example, which is 100 feet in diameter and has 48 foot high walls – a machine for automated cattle-feeding. And there are things which might be ignored if they did not take place on an American scale, like the Breughelish scene ...”

“... The hero​ of The Man in the Moone, a novel written in the late 1620s by the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin, is carried to the moon in a sky chariot pulled by a flock of wild swans. He spends the next few months among the peaceful ‘Lunars’ and gains a measure of fluency in their language, which ‘consisteth not so much of words and letters’ as of melodies ‘that no letters can expresse ...”

“... launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are alive in eternity. Their miracles prove their truth. To late antique pagans, however, as ...”

“... Cathedral in what real estate agents now call ‘Nolita’ in Manhattan commemorates the stand Bishop Hughes took against a mob threatening to burn down his church in 1844. The defensive amalgamation of Irish, Catholic and Democrat extended into other eastern cities and towns (though not all, and not all the time). Byron concentrates on Americans whose ...”

“... owed the chair of logic and metaphysics which he obtained at Glasgow in 1751 to the lobbying of James Oswald MP, the son of his legal guardian during his childhood, the continuing support of Henry Home and, possibly, the backing of the Duke of Argyll. And, as Phillipson stresses, we should not discount the importance of his lecturing successes in ...”

“... in charge at home as queen regent. She took to the role with panache: when the Scottish King James IV tried to exploit Henry’s absence by declaring war, Catherine revealed a decisive gift for organisation, masterminding the equipping and dispatch of English forces north. She even commissioned a jewelled armoured helmet and set out for Scotland ...”

“... Hogarth’, exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ‘general aim’ was not to ‘reach ...”

“...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... we are on it.’ Their taste for eccentric clothing – in Paris, Stein was once mistaken for a bishop – also caused a stir. Stein wore a greatcoat and Cossack hat, while Toklas favoured a pith helmet and officer’s jacket covered with pockets. According to Georges Braque, who ran into them in Avignon, such outfits were unfathomable, even in ...”