Search Results

“... the rejection of Modernism, ‘the impoverishment of national culture’, as the admired Peter Ackroyd calls it, dominate the final section. But the period has its heroes, and Appleyard’s choices of hero seem to coincide with those of Ackroyd: they are J.H. Prynne, ‘the most comprehensively gifted of living British poets’, and, on loan from New ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... gimmicks designed purely to upset people.’Throughout his career in pop, as manager of the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, and then as an unlikely recording artist himself, McLaren continually insisted that ideas were more important than music. Publicity and presentation could be an art form in their own right. McLaren liked to claim that ...”

“... from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did ...”

“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by ...”

“... together by James T. Como, a Professor of Rhetorical Communication in the City University of New York. He tells us in an introduction: ‘Now several societies exist for the purpose of studying Lewis’s thoughts; film rights to several of his books have been purchased, and filmed documentaries of his life have been produced; both popular and scholarly books ...”

“... typically disembarked at Philadelphia but then settled a broad arc of territory from central New York down through the Carolina back-country. The ‘remarkable mixture of peoples’ that captured the imagination of Crèvecoeur and so many later commentators was an 18th-century phenomenon. Culture and institutions, though, demand thicker description than ...”

“... himself with Hopper’s spinster sister and had the run of the family house in Nyack, New York, where the pictures were stored. In 1976 the Whitney Museum hired me to study the bequest, organise exhibitions and write a catalogue of Hopper’s work. I collected letters, interviews with Hopper and his wife, exhibition checklists and reviews, theatre ...”

“... of colour, like those vengeful district attorneys burning him at the stake in the courts of New York and Georgia, or the journalists who laughed when he said he was the greatest president for Blacks since Lincoln.Don has always been a Las Vegas kinda guy, with his showgirls and gold-plated toilets, a long-running joke in New ...”

“... useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing about ‘how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’. The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit-card debt, which had climbed to $1000, before she travelled ...”

“... flourishing for several thousand years, failed and was forgotten. This show, which comes from New York and will eventually move on to Athens, is the first big exhibition to use the museum’s new spaces. I never really knew the unreformed Ashmolean, and I retain only the impression of an overcrowded, loveable depository of jumbled treasures: Grand Tour marble ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his dreadful little volume,’ began Hollander in ...”

“... The second episode​ of season four of Mad Men opens in 1964, somewhere in New York State. Luxurious flakes of snow fall on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”