Search Results

“... towers of a city in the distance; then a set of ramshackle houses; a pasture and a farmhouse; the white screen of a drive-in; a field full of oil pumps. A drawling voice, all wide vowels and unclosed consonants, starts to philosophise: ‘The world is full of complainers, and the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee ... Something can always go wrong ...”

“... in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping animal noises at night. The thunderstorms and the warm, white rains. Everything tending to the excessive, the immoderate, the monstrous. Here, the parcelled tree breeds for the backhoe and the greige ‘mature community’, knocked up overnight from cardboard and nail guns and spray paint. Sometimes, dry, glacial air ...”

“... to be able to hear any voices but their own. One of those they should have been hearing was Michael Young’s. Young is the country’s most compelling sociologist. Not lower-middle-class in origin, not indeed English at all, but half-Irish and half-Australian, educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by ...”

“... gets on, manifestly exhausted, carrying a sleeping child. Paley, sitting in the last row of the white section, tries in vain to persuade the woman to take her seat. The woman is far too frightened of the consequences to do that, but finally agrees to place the child in Paley’s lap. A white man says to her: ‘Lady, I ...”

“... of them barricade themselves with their luggage. One ends up shrugging at the rather black and white notations: the ‘air-raid sandwiches packed for him by his friend the chaplain, a whole package of sandwiches with plenty of sausage in them, and the terrible thing was that they tasted so good’, ‘the schnapps was excellent,’ ‘they were still ...”

“... haven’t done poet or translator any favours with their cover (a creepy-looking black and white caricature of Tranströmer with curly-wurly writing that appears to promise a graphic novel within, and the words ‘Bright Scythe’ like a blue parrot along one shoulder), the odd title (a celebration of death?) or the book itself as an object: it’s ...”

“... last minute. Another traitor is executed, and the film ends with detailed verbal information, in white letters on a black screen, about the deaths of all the remaining four chief characters we have met, not too long after the events of the film. Three others have died in the course of the story. But as you can probably tell even from this quick and nasty ...”

“... about its natural history published in 1788 by its devoted, life-long inhabitant, the Rev. Gilbert White. Editions of that classic have by now become legion. Just as all leading actors have to play Hamlet at some time in their career, so it almost seems that every well-known figure on the natural history scene is cajoled sooner or later into producing a ...”

“... the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as told by Michael Scharf, a one-time US appointee at the UN and a Tribunal insider, is full of unexpected and telling ironies. Not the least of these concerns the involvement of the US Administration, which had previously been so worried about the possibility of having to ...”

“... Asya, the heroine of Michael Ignatieff’s novel of revolution and exile, is born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1900. As a child, she nearly drowns walking out over the thawing ice beneath which the River Vasousa roars. She has a vision there of a great skater. Her brush with death changes her and leaves her with a belief ‘even when fear had her in its clasp ...”

“... twelve. And he’s only fifteen now but you wouldn’t know.He said, ‘Are you sure?’I said, ‘Michael. It’s a spot, love, that’s all it is,’ and I got him some stuff to put on.He gets his trousers up sharp.He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’‘Why should I tell Dad? Why should I tell Dad anything?’‘And don’t tell our Maureen.’‘As if,’ I ...”

“... Every picture tells a story – even the illustrations on the covers of books. Michael Kater’s cover shows a rather shabby, cabbage-patch Hitler attending a harvest festival in 1936, receiving the salutes of a crowd in which the faces of adoring women are prominent. The image is both revealing and misleading. The peasant costumes certainly alert us to the affinities between Nazism and provincial kitsch, and Hitler’s studied geniality also reminds us of his extraordinary personal popularity, always much greater than that of the party as a whole or of its other leaders ...”

“... respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated subject’, something more than ‘bystander’ and more complicated than ‘beneficiary’. No one alive now whose family received wealth from slavery can be considered guilty. But that doesn’t mean, in ...”

“... to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and housing market have never provided equitable care, opportunity or provision. As a result of these inequalities, they are being infected and killed at a ...”

“... what to do with all the recurring figures, the CRO-riddle, Bucephalus the (s)talking horse, the white (shaggy?) dog, the valise that survives into the SF future, the polygraph. Any one of them might lead to the heart of the matter. Take the last. It comes up three times, first in ‘Pascal’: Jefferson is so beside himself with glee that he finishes off a ...”