Search Results

“... receptive to both, but immune to the enervating forces of each. Other Traditions, a series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1989-90, is the poet’s most recent answer to the conundrum, and suggests that it is possible for an individual to consort with a tradition without becoming locked in an oedipal struggle or a fatal ...”

“... although even there, some plays appear to have voiced sentiments which can scarcely have pleased Charles I – but the ‘town’. Butler devotes some space to popular and apprentice drama, where an Elizabethan tradition of irreverence lived on, but more to the ‘élite’ theatres which answered to the gentrification of London and which provided models of ...”

“... Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from ...”

“... the poetry for which we chiefly remember him all in the past, his hopes and his reasons for hope decayed. He was not yet at the worst, however. His tears could still evoke answering tears, and his declarations of accomplishment and serious intent had not yet lost their credibility. The devastating hallucination in which he saw Sara Hutchinson in bed ...”

“... sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its ...”

“... QuartetThe​ image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just ...”

“... inside the beau monde of Brideshead, and its rhapsody on high Catholic society. Waugh, as the hero Charles Ryder, longs to be with the real in-group; and the artist in Waugh creates Ryder’s more obviously vulgar, because successful, doppelgänger, Rex Mottram, who has a Thatcherite vision of the attainability of all the distinguished things that Waugh/Ryder ...”

“... it by providing detailed evidence to the contrary. A year or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his ...”

“... an event about which his circle was nervous. ‘Moran’ is a reference to his personal physician, Charles Moran, and Soames primly advises us: ‘A “Moran” was the name given by WSC to a special stimulant pill prescribed by Lord Moran for him to take before a major speech.’ Special stimulant pill? Soames offers no clue as to its chemical ...”

“... resting her hands on Patrick’s shoulders, ‘are you your own worst enemy?’ ‘I certainly hope so,’ said Patrick. ‘I dread to think what would happen if somebody else turned out to be better at it than me.’ There is a fortifying, rather old-fashioned pleasure to be had, as in Henry James, from such consciously worked dialogue, though the hazard ...”

“... post World War Two. Not a very big subject, in Kenner’s view, since the whole thing stopped with Charles Tomlinson and Basil Bunting and is only spuriously ‘kept alive’ these days by the careerist machinations of people like Craig Raine and Andrew Motion. Kenner is not writing specifically for an Australian audience but he is writing for an ignorant, or ...”

“... that Walker (Parker’s new name) was possibly dead, or else dreaming the whole story, like Charles Foster Kane.Isn’t this heady, inside movies stuff just what you hoped for? Well, I should tell you now that much of what I’ve talked about so far comes from Adventures of a Suburban Boy, the book Boorman published with Faber in 2003, which was a ...”

“... as he says it is. He is treading geographically but not methodologically in the footsteps of Charles Booth. His aim is to convey to his readers as vividly as he can just how awful are the lives of the poor and powerless inhabitants of the inner cities of a supposedly civilised nation which ought to be a great deal more ashamed of allowing such conditions ...”

“... du Palais Bourbon, and has long been edited by a handsome woman of diplomatic family, Edmonde Charles-Roux. When I was Brogue’s features editor, Frog still revolved around the couture collections; Frog being frog and grand, Condé Nast’s photographers had first and private access to the collections. Though I had nothing to do with fashion, it was once ...”

“... of mind, to have shown itself as illusion. There follows either resignation or the transfer of hope to this alternative dimension, often in practice amounting to much the same thing. The central 19th-century arguments are indeed those traced by Fraser. She examines four phases: the attempt to rejoin religion and aesthetics, in the Oxford Movement; the ...”