Search Results

“... the artist, the teacher and scholar) and found distinctly wanting – his personal fortune a gross travesty of genuine value. There may be easy sport and consolation here but a response of this kind misplaces its critical energies, rehearsing a powerful cultural snobbery but missing the point. The rise of excellence has two aspects which demand ...”

“... answer is no. The president should face some hard facts: his 3 per cent margin of victory over John Kerry doesn’t remotely resemble Reagan’s 18 point knock-out over Walter Mondale. Although 1984 marked a decisive victory over liberalism, last year’s election revealed that the most liberal candidate since Mondale was able to run neck-and-neck with an ...”

“... one thing, and an important thing; but if there are occasional cases where anger or prejudice or gross neglect distorts judgment, then in those cases the rights and liberties of the subject are equally important. It is only by permitting such allegations to be tried, the argument goes, that it can be known whether there are cases of this kind and, if there ...”

“... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...”

“... document the biography. Once the book appeared, it was given short shrift in eminent quarters. Sir John Pope-Hennessy, writing in the life-enhancing Now!, described it as ‘tawdry’, while working up a tremendous lather of indignation at the impertinence of the whole enterprise. Professor Sidney Freedberg availed himself of the Boston Globe to lay about the ...”

“... fact that you can tell, just by looking at it, that any sentence of the syntactic form P and Q (‘John swims and Mary drinks’, as it might be) is true only if P and Q are both true. ‘You can tell just by looking’ means: to see that the entailments hold, you don’t have to know anything about what either P or Q means and you don’t have to know ...”

“... the average manual-working wage-earner had paid no tax at all, by the 1970s a fifth of the gross average wage was being taken by income tax and National Insurance contributions. As both the expectations which voters now had of the Welfare State and the costs of meeting them rose in parallel, so did their unwillingness to have it funded out of their own ...”

“... the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined civilised state in which we live, is removed from a gross state of nature’. Burke’s idea of drapery was the one long propounded in Reynolds’s Discourses, whose ‘political theory of painting’, as John Barrell phrases it, was closely bound up with his support of ...”

“... made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the mob made merry, barracking the enemy barracks-style, so clumsy in manner, so inimical to the eye. Very pertinently, Dionysius puts this alongside Homer’s description of Achilles dragging the dead Hector’s body round Troy. Is there any ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... not. The king of France, the divines preached, had two bodies. One was a corporeal body, frail or gross; the other was an ideal body, which never died, but was inhabited, as it were, by the next king, who slid into it in a seamless transition. After the execution of Louis XVI, his only living son became Louis XVII. No proclamation or ceremony was needed, no ...”

“... and years!’ The bouncy tone is explained by this being a fantasy of what Baker might say to John Updike in the unlikely event of their finding themselves playing a round of golf together. It was the sure convergence of apparent incompatibles that gave The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) its impact, even for readers who found William Beckwith, the studly ...”

“... of the usual morose adolescent parables and things like that. The first issue had a foreword by John Wain, the novelist, who had just appeared then and was very famous. I wrote to him to ask if there was some message he could send to youthful aspirants and he did. It was rather good, about half a page, which ended: ‘and, if all this fails, back to the ...”

“... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...”