Search Results

“... writing. In the reader, it produces a kind of constructive estrangement from words. Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won’t be too wrong. Now I feel like someone who thinks there’s a shower on the way, and then it rains for ten days straight. Williams is just full of alphabets. The first story is even called ‘The ...”

“... is eager to proclaim an evangel of some kind, and therefore must be aggressive. A story in William Trevor’s new collection, The Hill Bachelors, treats these themes in a surprising but apposite way. ‘Of the Cloth’ describes the declining days of a Church of Ireland clergyman, the Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice, rector of the mountain parish of ...”

“... Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell onboard the USS Saugus, where he was being held, his manacles just in sight; he is moodily handsome, in a round-necked ...”

“... this: ‘The books here on my shelves have countless examples of similar behaviour.’When Michael Ryan murdered 14 people in Hungerford in 1987 (and then killed himself), the idea was put about that he’d been motivated by watching Rambo videos. That someone could, apparently without motive, massacre strangers on the streets of a Berkshire town was ...”

“... Marine’ because you’d fallen for this young priest he was a loiner Tim Ryan that’s a lie and driven with him July a heatwave all through the West the East Riding some harbour Hornsea Spurn Head it’s pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus White Fathers it’s invisible as ...”

“... contemporaries not just by money and life-chances but by a ‘difference of culture’. As Alan Ryan has pointed out, the people who wave the banners of multiculturalism typically pride themselves on their Post-Modernism, but revert to old-fashioned essentialism when they start describing the incommensurable identities of members of diverse ...”

“... from waste management to immigration to pornography. A forthcoming essay collection edited by Ryan Johnson and William Cohen will be entitled Filth. The interest in ‘waste-theory’ may be seen as a recyclable and non-biodegradable byproduct of a number of related tendencies in contemporary literary studies: 1) the ...”

“... do no more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to ...”

“... single reason will be Obama’s choice of Robert Gates as secretary of defence. Gates worked under William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in Nicaragua. The elder Bush later renominated him and got him ...”

“... with other recent published work, redresses the hagiographical bias of the previous biographies by Ryan (1924), Greaves (1961) and Levenson (1973). In the Late Victorian and Edwardian years, Connolly made an intellectually impressive and, indeed, ingenious attempt to accommodate socialism to Ireland’s dominant national and religious traditions. Bernard ...”

“... she is too eclectic and inconsistent in her methodology (as suggested by the savaging Alan Ryan gave her book on Mill); while to hard-nosed historians of political action, she seems altogether too preoccupied with ideology (as shown by the severe criticisms of her attempt to analyse the passing of the Second Reform Bill in these terms). For the first ...”

“... The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the idea that he and the others were political prisoners and insisted that they be treated as common felons. (Harcourt generally took a ...”

“... it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels are ...”

“... had resulted in more than $5.5 billion in realignments’ of funds. Last year Brigadier-General William McCoy, head of the US Army Corp of Engineers, told the Washington Post: ‘The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq … This was just supposed to be a jump-start.’ Exactly what this entails is clear from the new Sigir report, which declares that ...”

“... now, is a massive and explicit testimony to sensory change.’ A review of Miller’s book by Alan Ryan brought on a correspondence in the Listener, and Miller wrote an article for that journal, thus continuing, said the aggrieved subject, ‘his anti-McLuhan crusade’ and going on like some 19th-century rationalist attacking Catholicism. He even suspected ...”