Search Results

“... they tried to write themselves into existence as separate selves. They were like a schizoid Robinson Crusoe, their island a cramped upstairs bedroom in a North Wales semi. When, like Crusoe, they discovered the self needed its Friday, they began stalking the American boys at the nearby airbase, eventually offering up their virginities to a loathsome ...”

“... And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist reinvents distinctively as his or her own, defines the genre that Reaves has discovered and ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”

“... of anthocyanins (the red and blue colouring matters of flowers) under the brilliant Professor Robinson, a professorial Fellow of Magdalen, where he was treated with undisguised contempt by his fellow Fellow C.S. Lewis, who regarded Robinson as a typical scientist and an object of almost automatic censure. Todd himself ...”

“... Few previous far-right jamborees had boasted such a deep roster of senior British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the ...”

“... that old Boer axis again. Ebenezer has read just one book in his life, which, not unnaturally, is Robinson Crusoe. Stuck at one point for something to do, he takes it down, thinking perhaps to read it again, but decides against: he knows what happens, after all. He has something of Crusoe, though not Defoe’s so much as Elizabeth Bishop’s sadder, more ...”

“... manufactured mythology even as it built itself on the ruins of the Communist counter-culture. Michael Denning, in his long interpretative history The Cultural Front, has questioned this disdain. His notion of the culture of the Popular Front embraces sturdy proletarian sagas like Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ...”

“... the Socialist Workers Party, which had called for the National Front to be driven off the streets. Michael Foot, on Labour’s left since the 1930s, insisted that ‘the most ineffective way of fighting the fascists is to behave like them.’ The Liberal Party called for a prohibition on marches by ‘extreme left-wing organisations’, a message taken up by ...”

“... reimagined for Phantom Ride involve images or technologies of violence. The camera swerves around Michael Sandle’s A 20th-Century Memorial: an elaborately queasy rendering in bronze and brass of a skeletal Mickey Mouse equipped with machine gun and tripod. There’s another machine gun among a cluster of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptures. Patrick ...”

“... the 20th century. Lem belongs in that company of SF writers – Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson – who have practised intentional extrapolation with regular and sustained success.Is prescience the measure of SF as an art? An attractive truism says that the best writing about the future is a lens for apprehending the present: Orwell’s Nineteen ...”

“... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... more spectacular instances of 19th-century Sapphic impersonation. First is the strange case of ‘Michael Field’: a pair of homosexual female lovers, aunt and niece, whose jointly-authored, Sapphically-inspired verses in Long Ago (1889) set the stage for later lesbian appropriations of the poet. Second up is Swinburne, whose outrageously sado-masochistic ...”

“... sown in the national and provincial press during the run-up to publication day. With luck, Robert Robinson or a lesser TV person will be recruited to do a celebratory book programme. In addition to the traditional newspaper, shop-window and point-of-sale displays there will also be extensive coverage on commercial radio. This ...”

“... any more. The unpretentious manner creates a sense of authenticity. And this is reinforced by the Robinson Crusoe-like episodes of clearing the virgin bush and establishing a farm. This was the activity of Facey’s early years: clearing, fencing, preparing the ground. After escaping from the family of rustlers, Bert goes off to work for other impoverished ...”