Search Results

“... me that she is one of the saints who multiplied in reliquaries after their death, to produce, as Ian Paisley’s website reminds us (in an essay called ‘The Errors of Rome’), the many prepuces of the infant Jesus, and the variously coloured hair of His madly trichogenous mother. Perhaps, in these days of cloning, or in future days of cloning, we will ...”

“... is that novels without much plot tend to languish. Suddenly everything should be shorter, even Ian McEwan. More troubling was Professor Carey’s opinion that Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good is ‘a very impressive novel of ideas’, just the kind of thing the Booker should favour. Ah, that would explain the exclusion of Coetzee’s novel of ...”

“... cliché don’t really come off – he didn’t have the resources to reproduce Beckett’s ‘no bone to pick with graveyards’ stuff – but the book raises some laughs when the humour is less self-consciously lugubrious. A Touch of Love is harder to defend from a strictly avant-garde point of view. Using a broadly naturalistic idiom, it tells the story of ...”

“... Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig ...”

“... horizon of the Beatles: ‘Whether Kraftwerk or the Beatles were more influential has long been a bone of contention among journalists and fans.’ Not to mention that other lot of sulky layabouts: ‘Hütter/Schneider would one day be recognised as belonging in the same league as Lennon/McCartney or Jagger/Richards.’ Really? Up to and including ...”

“... had been his life.’ The sharpest point that Marjorie Perloff makes is to quote from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, recalling his treatment of one of his mistresses, the Lithuanian dancer Vija Vetra, for whom he declared ‘undying love’, and whom he set up in a Manhattan flat, rented in the name of Mr and Mrs Robert Lowell. A few weeks ...”

“... the conventional reading of medical goals and achievements – and most of the points discussed by Ian Kennedy in the 1981 Reith Lectures have been raised before. Nevertheless, his legal approach is novel, and the lectures themselves were well-organised and delivered with remarkable force and clarity. Whatever their reservations about the conclusions, many ...”

“... peritoneum so characteristic of an abdominal operation in life. Then there is the smell of burning bone from the reciprocating hand-held circular saw that the mortuary technician uses to remove the top of the skull after cutting the scalp from ear to ear and pulling it down over the face and hooking it temporarily under the chin. Familiar, too, is the ...”

“... were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.Dawkins on ...”

“... the surfaces of the bones and distributing them – each rank in the hierarchy has its allotted bone. There’s an immense amount of detail here, and whether or not it is fitted rightly, Sahlins does a masterly job of producing a coherent narrative, from within a conjectured Hawaiian structural space of ideas and practices. To which Obeyesekere protests ...”

“... comes ill from a man who sneered ruthlessly at his own country while giving aid and comfort to Ian Smith’s gang of traitors and mutineers. The vulgarity of the politics also compromises, I find, the impression of the gentleman. When Worsthorne writes of being taken up by Irving Kristol at Encounter in the mid-Fifties, his self-deprecation deserts him as ...”

“... suicide or an accident.There’s also the question of what he was called. Before settling on Ian Robert Maxwell he had repeatedly changed his name according to the political needs of the moment. Born Abraham Leib Hoch into a Yiddish-speaking community in the town of Solotvino, then in Czechoslovakia and today in Ukraine, he had used ten different names ...”

“... and would be reinfused into his real flesh at the resurrection. Ditto with the splinters of bone and skulls on display in charnel-houses. The bones of St Ursula, and the eleven thousand virgins who were martyred with her, are still displayed on the walls of the Golden Chamber in her church in Cologne, as if in a floral arrangement, commissioned by pious ...”

“... the phrase baleine à îlot (whale/small island) can be made to yield baleine à ilote (flexible bone/Spartan serf), which was combined with a comparable move from mou à raille (a spineless person/to tease or ridicule) to mou à rail (lungs of a slaughtered calf/railway lines). Constraints of some kind are of course at work in any composition – what is a ...”

“... the chain that became Mothercare; the Shand Kydds’ wealth came from wallpaper manufacture; and Ian Maxwell-Scott was employed as a director of the Clermont, having bought his substantial home in Sussex on the proceeds of an insurance policy taken out against his wife having twins, which she did in 1966.For a man with plenty of money and a short attention ...”