Search Results

“... Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely ...”

“... Donald Davie is already known for – among many other things – his striking comments on the hymns of Watts and Wesley in A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest 1700-1930 (1978). Now he has devoted an entire book to the hymn in 18th-century England – or rather, as the title indicates, he is trying to define a specific genre or set of modes and tones that constitute ‘the 18th-century hymn ...”

“... instincts than he seems to have been. Second, his analysis of word frequencies, a technique that Donald Foster used in order to finger Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors: he was proved right when Klein (eventually) owned up, as James isn’t in a position to do; and Foster changed his mind about another of his celebrated attributions, of ‘A Funerall ...”

“... in 1932-33, when Douglas Jardine used the Nottinghamshire fast bowler Harold Larwood to destroy Donald Bradman and the rest of the Australian batting order. When the Australians beat England in the winter of 1974-75, none of them was yet thirty, yet in Eagar’s photographs the players all look older and much more manly than cricketers today. Eagar took a ...”

“... of Mercury. How that belief came about, and how Einstein came to demolish it, is the subject of Thomas Levenson’s eye-opening book.Pluto lost its planetary status ten years ago after a group of astronomers, Brown among them, discovered another object of roughly the same size orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune.2 If Pluto was a planet, then so was Eris (as ...”

“... because the rest of the beach is private. Exclusive, expensive and private define Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach club. The name – ‘between sea and lagoon’ – was chosen by its first owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, who inherited one fortune and made another from frozen food. The architect was Joseph Urban, an Austrian émigré who ...”

“... yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the wisp, has nevertheless over the last ...”

“... release incriminating tapes, which ordered states to permit same-sex marriage, and which rejected Donald Trump’s last-ditch pleas for a judicial coup d’état. It is also the court which ruled that African Americans, no matter their status, free or enslaved, are not citizens of the United States, that women could lawfully be prohibited from practising law ...”

“... 1939 thriller Rogue Male goes to ground. As for the bunker under the White House that Donald Trump went to ‘inspect’ on 29 May, while Black Lives Matter protesters gathered near Lafayette Park – well, think what you will about that one.Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O’Connell ...”

“... Variorum: A Defence of Heresy and Heretics’, the American poet Ed Dorn honours Donald Davie’s penultimate collection of poems, To Scorch or Freeze (1989), as ‘the most economical rebuke ... this age in moral free-fall is likely to get’. It is Davie’s most experimental poetry book: a series of religious meditations based on the ...”

“... Fritz August von Kaulbach of her as a Pierrette with her four brothers as Pierrots. ‘The young Thomas,’ Katia wrote in her book Unwritten Memories, who was 14 years old at the time the picture was done (I was six), was still living in Lübeck and, like so many others, saw the picture in a magazine. He liked it so much that he cut it out and tacked it ...”

“... of the superficial’ was Lord Northcliffe’s advice for tabloid journalists. It’s something Donald Trump appears to understand for himself – and so do the journalists who write about him. Or most of them. Michael Wolff never planned to write a book about the president just as Trump never planned to become president. Wolff remained uncertain about his ...”

“... of war. The Bush administration ‘fought one of its fiercest internal brawls’ – Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on one side, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice on the other – ‘before Bush ratified the policy that Cheney had declared: the Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield.’ Since the War ...”

“... post-post-modern, one true dilemma that faces us is what it means to be post-Christian. Thomas Hardy faced up to this in his poems, as Dennis Enright and Patricia Beer have faced up to it since. The more publicised and profitable concerns of their contemporaries seem, by comparison, trivial. How hard it is to live in a post-Christian world ...”

“... on the object of its appetite. In spite of such chapter headings as ‘The Medical Mafia’, Donald Gould’s book is no petard, cunningly placed to give sceptics entry to Asklepios’s temple. It is a vibrant device for keeping agitation alive at the frontiers but orthodoxy safe within. At the kernel of this book is the stuff of which Mills and Boon ...”