Search Results

“... with a political agenda. Homer could assume that his audience knew the outline of the myth of Helen of Troy, and that in consequence he didn’t need to lay it all out. But perhaps there never was a consistent and complete version of any myth, one that you could walk all the way around and find that everything matched and agreed from every angle. In the ...”

“... forms, and in those getting good results in their A-level examinations, would continue.’ But for Helen Gardner, who served at that time on the Robbins Committee on Higher Education, those confident extrapolators of trends figure cosily enough as ‘our statisticians’; and she is not assailed by any suspicion that she, as representing the literary ...”

“... forces of retribution; and since Orestes at last escapes maternal retribution, Janet Hobhouse’s Helen is arguably the more tragic character of the two. Yet the saddest page of the book comes before the story: ‘Hobhouse, Janet, 1948-91 ... Copyright 1993 by the Estate of Janet Hobhouse’. I had met (I cannot say ‘I knew’) Janet Hobhouse in her ...”

“... frauds in Australia’s rich history of literary hoaxes and deceptions. Before she was exposed, Helen Demidenko, as she styled herself (Helen Darville as she in fact is), might have seemed to be one of the favourites for the prize; indeed, the press was understandably anxious to know whether we had intended shortlisting ...”

“... names on the contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of ...”

“... is Hartmut Lange, whose Missing Persons, published by Toby Press, is translated from the German by Helen Atkins. The acknowledgments, in their entirety, run: ‘I am grateful to my wife for her assistance.’ An example to us all. The Biggest Bar of Chocolate Prize goes to the publicity department of Voyager (an imprint of HarperCollins and ‘the publishers ...”

“... and impulsive. She has been unfaithful to him; he fancies and fantasises about a colleague, Helen, who appears to reciprocate his desires, but they have never acted on them. Priya isn’t blind to Ben’s infatuation, and tells him during an argument that he might as well have slept with Helen, asking him ...”

“... and not playing fair with the new competition. It would take a lot more than any of that to faze Helen MacKenzie, who was recently named Postwoman of the Year. Out on her rounds on the Isle of Lewis last October, MacKenzie encountered a millworker, Stephen MacKay, who had nearly lost his arm in an industrial accident and was bleeding heavily. MacKenzie took ...”

“... The shift may have been helped by phonetic ambiguities: the saint graal, ‘Sankgreall’ in Sir Thomas Malory’s spelling, the ‘holy vessel’, leached into the sang réal, ‘royal blood’. The Holy Grail was the vessel that had preserved the Holy Blood. Europe, however, was awash with holy blood – Hailes Abbey had a highly efficacious sample – and ...”

“... approach displays the humility about our place in the world and the tolerance of ambiguity that Thomas Bauer argues characterised pre-modern Islamic societies. At the same time, his effort to compile all possible models into a single volume was a way of containing that uncertainty.In the centuries after Qazwini’s death, each new generation and each new ...”

“... newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from ...”

“... house nearby, less ‘high-rank’ than Josie’s, where a boy called Rick lives with his mother, Helen. (‘Are you a guest?’ she asks Klara. ‘Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?’) Josie and Rick have been friends since early childhood, and have long-held plans to spend their lives together, but these are now in jeopardy: Josie has been ...”

“... that Britain’s population was shrinking fast, with dire consequences for national wellbeing. Thomas Malthus was equally convinced that the opposite was true, making that case in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus was disturbed by the possibility of unchecked growth because he believed it was a natural tendency for population to ...”

“... of the Ugolino episode by Seamus Heaney and others – including Chaucer, Jonathan Richardson, Thomas Gray, Frederick Howard and Thomas Medwin (with help from Shelley). (The editors err in saying irritably that Heaney ‘foists a “melon” into the starved count’s mouth’. In fact, it is Tydeus who feeds on ...”

“... at his preparatory school writing on a classroom noticeboard ‘I REBEL’. Lambert quotes Helen Mirren as saying that ‘conservatism was the flip side of Lindsay the rebel – and for a rebel, conservatism becomes an act of rebellion.’ That’s a neat way to resolve the contradiction, but why resolve it at all? A highly polished product of a system ...”