Search Results

“... on one of those bum-freezing outdoor coats, an operation which wastes thousands of man-hours every winter. Who loves zips, other than the television producers who show us gentlemen audibly operating them as they exchange information in those obligatory urinal scenes? Chenoune does not wholly ignore the zip. He quotes an authority as saying, in the context of ...”

“... Wrath, turning to whimsical studies of the Californian proletariat. And, after the mauling which Winter of Discontent received in 1961, he gave up fiction altogether, concentrating in his last years on journalism (for which he won more prizes). Parini’s basic strategy is that of the Blue Band Margarine advertisements – to associate his product as often ...”

“... left all his academic baggage behind. As a travel writer he inclines far more to Theroux than to Robert Byron, with Theroux’s delighted fascination with conversational absurdity and a comparable resourcefulness in undertaking an arduous trip. No car touring or sightseeing or cool drinks on the terrace. His is also a thoroughly English ...”

“... There are scattered in this volume some excellent sketches of his contemporaries. There is Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, whose ‘father and mother went to Rome in their own carriage’ and whose son became Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. Tennyson himself, Sassoon says, ‘never looked more bard-like than Bridges did when I arrived this evening ...”

“... in terms of years, the length of office of editors of Annales such as Burguière, Marc Eerro Robert Mandrou. (His conclusion? ‘If at first you don’t succeed ... ’) He has carefully mapped out – in the style of Jacques Bertin, the admirable draughtsman of Annales – the geographical origins of the contributors to the Mélanges Febvre of 1953 and ...”

“... outside ourselves of all that is bad in the world and in us. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil called this process the making of ‘displeasure-images’, and identified it as ‘part of the oldest psychotechnical apparatus mankind possesses’. Together with our tendency to take things figuratively, this is the mechanism which complies with ...”

“... to dwell on the mixture of manners, the ‘tension between the styles’. Everett suggests that Robert Hitchens’s Bella Donna, a bestseller which figures in the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 – a fine English murder – was one of Eliot’s sources, and that he had been reading Gentlemen prefer blondes and Ring Lardner, here described with some ...”

“... with egg yolk and oats and then exposed to the mercy of two hungry ducks. A merchant called Robert Nettleton was awarded the rank of ‘archimandrite’ in a club called the British Monastery, although he also allowed his house to be used for divine service and was actively involved in petitioning George I for assistance in building an English ...”

“... trip. Perhaps it was always unlikely that someone whose models were Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Tzara, Robert Walser and Gottfried Benn would win prizes, honours or even a sizeable readership in Britain or the US. And his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased ...”

“... subservience of 21st-century citizens to 18th-century political solutions, foremost among them Robert Dahl in his devastating audit of the American political system, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2002). Dahl’s attempt to stir Americans from their cultic attachment to the founders is more than matched, however, by the efforts of ...”

“... In the winter of 1609-10, Galileo Galilei made a series of astronomical observations that added to the growing list of anomalies threatening the stability of the earth-centred Ptolemaic cosmos. His weak spyglass made mountains appear on the formerly pristine moon, resolved the Milky Way into innumerable stars, multiplied the number of objects in well-charted constellations and, most spectacularly, revealed four satellites orbiting Jupiter ...”

“... etc, etc … All in it is very cheerful: I brought my library and museum from America last winter.’ The ‘museum’ is a reference to the collection of ethnographic objects and exotic souvenirs that Wellcome had begun to assemble as a child in Minnesota (where he had lived through the Sioux uprising), and to which he had added while working in ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him ...”

“... More recently, the case has attracted attention from historians of illicit literature such as Robert Darnton, interested in explaining the success of Thérèse philosophe, and from historians of medicine fascinated by Cadière’s visions and trances. An article on it even appeared in the journal Epilepsy and Behaviour. Scientists, ignoring the long ...”

“... Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh Arizona ...”