Search Results

“... who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself. A schoolboy, asked to produce a review, is said to have written: ‘This book tells me ...”

“... and Kenneth Boulding, the two other scientist-visionaries whose lives and theories are examined in Robert Wright’s Three Scientists and their Gods, Fredkin has devoted himself to finding a theory that explains it all, that brings everything together, from DNA to slime cells, ant colonies, telephone systems, supermarket chains, television and religion. As his ...”

“... is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical self-consciousness. The 20th century, for these writers, is the historical century par excellence. The 19th, by contrast, was less exhaustively documented and now seems to have been nourished on chauvinistic legends rather than the brutality of facts. For ...”

“... Robert Vitalis​ tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development ...”

“... Allen Tate, though, there were more pitfalls than plateaux. Tate was a quarrelsome type and deeply self-important; he had a taste for feuds, for laying down the law, for scolding friends who fell short of his elevated standards – both personal and literary. Many saw him as a somewhat comic figure, forever tinkering with the details of his Southern ancestry ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed ...”

“... to this vision of an egalitarian community governed by the principle of freely-given service, and Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of ...”

“... Daniel Farson was polite, self-deprecating, impressed by modesty and authenticity, grateful for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... that an actor might roll about his tongue. The principal narrator is Roy Croucher, an unreasonably self-satisfied Londoner, in his fifties, with experience of jungle warfare in Malaya and a subversively conservative attitude towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk green, stuffs potatoes up their exhaust ...”

“... nine or ten years old. And Isherwood was not the only one to be impressed by little Wystan’s ‘self-assurance’, his ‘clinical detachment’, his ‘air of authority’. Among his school-fellows, says Isherwood, he had the ‘status of a kind of witch-doctor’.This talk of clinics and doctors mainly had to do with Auden’s precocious know-how about ...”

“... areas are now well on the way to being broken up and redeveloped. The architecture of the ‘self-financing’ management institute is encroaching steadily, and even the stretches of parkland that remain seem to be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their ...”

“... this, holding out against the dread prospect of statutory regulation. However, several bits of self-serving chaff get thrown into the picture here. One is the idea that journalists, as self-styled talkers of truth to power, should be above the law – the law against bribing the police, for example, or breaching ...”

“... Garry Winogrand, what could be done with ease and subtlety at home was harder to achieve abroad. Robert Frank worked in Britain between 1951 and 1953. Born in Switzerland but based in New York, he was still half-hoping his pictures would appeal to a magazine like Life but at the same time he was trying, as he wrote, to ‘break from the Traditional ...”

“... further intensive but brief periods of therapy. After Lowenfeld’s death in 1985, she continued a self-analysis through her art, her written reflections and what she called her ‘pensées plume’, or ‘feather-thoughts’. ‘The cost of Parents fixation (one of the cost[s]) is your total inability to deal with siblings,’ she wrote in her diary in ...”