Search Results

“... cars.’ Note the ‘we’. By her own analysis, Gordimer has always been a legitimate target. Paul Bannerman, the central character in Get a Life, is a campaigning ecologist who, when the novel opens, is suffering from cancer. His treatment has left him radioactive and only his parents, regardless of the danger to their own health, are capable of the ...”

“... ugly and envious – Darcy, the chinless wonder, Bunter, the gross and hideous glutton, Vernon-Smith, the rich but vulgar bounder, Skinner and Stott, the loathsome sneaks. Juvenile readers would eventually come across these repulsive boys in real life: most of them went to work on the staff of Private Eye. The righteous Harry Wharton, of course, joined the ...”

“... or ‘beautiful new hat’ would win his interest. But it was mainly her literary friendship with Paul Bourget, and her beginnings as an author, with The Greater Inclination (1899) and The Valley of Decision (1902), that achieved this aim. ‘The explanation, of course, was that in that interval I had found myself’: Edith Wharton’s first ...”

“... by treating people like Drayson and Bellhouse as heroes for creating wealth from knowledge’ – Paul Drayson and Brian Bellhouse are both medical inventors – ‘that Britain will develop a fully fledged entrepreneurial culture,’ Leadbeater puffs, as if Thatcherism had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit ...”

“... added physiognomical principles to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... The publication of Bentham’s Collected Works is likely to produce more new or revised views than the publication of Burke’s Writings and Speeches: indeed, it has already done so. The Bentham project will also take longer, for the establishment of the text is a herculean task. Bentham left a vast archive of notes and of drafts and redrafts of works planned but not published ...”

“... Suddenly we are in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.Drain may have become the Westboro Baptists’ St Paul – the convert who stiffens the creed and seizes control – but he is a ludicrous figure even by Westboro standards. You can watch him and one of the uncles on YouTube, being nimbly tormented by Russell Brand: two pudgy doofuses you’d think twice about ...”

“... half-Jewish background and made her only foray into political journalism in order to rebuke Pope Paul VI for being tactless to Golda Meir. ‘All the more since I discovered myself to be a Catholic animal,’ she wrote in 1963, ‘am I a Gentile Jewess.’ When Spark was starting out, in the late 1940s, she was determined to avoid the ‘slop and ...”

“... warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the Company was attacked by Burke and Adam Smith for combining opportunism and monopolistic greed. The Company eventually responded by building up what it saw as its moral superiority and entitlement to rule India, even if only as the ostensible representative of an absent Mughal emperor. Three ideas were ...”

“... that was neither easy nor conventional. She became a patron of living artists including Matthew Smith and the Neo-Romantics, writing of Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox, that it was ‘slightly “magic” … it changes towards evening in a most mysterious manner.’ Meanwhile the stilted relations within ...”

“... indeed’). But by the 20th century the Book itself had become an object of disagreement. In 1935 Paul Vellacott, who presumably continued to beat boys at least for major offences, decided to discontinue entering each punishment in the Book. ‘I decided . . . to discontinue this tale of degradation, ugliness and tears,’ he wrote in it. ‘The picture the ...”

“... could then be reduced on such valuable activities as saving, for example. In the tradition of Adam Smith, this proposal relies more on national self-interest than on virtue, and would need relatively little international co-operation to function. But more often Stiglitz’s reforms ask for permanent international bureaucracies to be set up: a judicial body to ...”

“... book, Writing Degree Zero, with Elements of Semiology, was translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith in 1967, and this volume is now reissued. The Fashion System appears in English for the first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the ...”

“... theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English literature.’ Peter ...”