Search Results

“... new ones. Other resources – cashew nuts, coal, cocoa, cotton, livestock, palm oil, rubber, tin, wood – once the mainstay of the economy, have been allowed to decline year on year since the oil boom of the early Seventies. There are two reasons for this: first, Nigerians have no faith in their own ability to manage such a technologically sophisticated ...”

“... of the Free City of Danzig in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very ...”

“... that homes for heroes meant rehousing the whole of the working class: Not brick and tile, but wood, thatch, walls of mixed Material, and buildings in plain strength fixed. ... O better this sort of shelter – And villages on the land set helter-skelter On hillsides, dotted on plains – than the too exact Straight streets of modern times, that strait and ...”

“... of concerts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, then run by another cultivated Brit, Sir Charles Moses. Goossens found an ‘immense spirit and enthusiasm’ for the musical arts, but nowhere to satisfy them beyond Sydney Town Hall, a wedding-cake confection in Second Empire style with fuzzy acoustics, seating at best 2500. Like many ...”

“... house with embroidered curtains, a stereo, a television, a large drinks bar made of finely worked wood and framed photos of him and his wife, Rosa-Isela, Pancho’s sister. ‘All this comes from my work,’ he says sadly, standing in the middle of the living-room, in front of a blue velour sofa where a small child is sleeping calmly. ‘But I fell into ...”

“... I start crying at the informational video, which juxtaposes stiff ambassadorial footage of King Charles talking about his nonna with a female voice intoning: ‘She stood in tears amid the alien corn.’ I’M in the alien corn! The effect of poetry is reliable, still. Your skin gets a whole size smaller.Upstairs, I walk past the life-mask, with its visible ...”

“... through the waxworks of English history. Ackroyd’s early mentor J.H. Prynne, in a lecture on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, speaks of ‘that extraordinary poem where Blake decides to rework Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton.’ ‘There are,’ he continues, ‘congestions of personality which result from that ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s ...”

“... in July 1970, he had another breakdown and was admitted to Greenwoods Nursing Home in St John’s Wood. This was too much for Blackwood. ‘I am going away,’ she wrote to say. ‘If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I ...”

“... their civility the better to use law and force against the Irish, from Spenser’s long-haired wood kerns through the Fenians to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the ...”

“... callow young men should have been the first to invade the floor of the House of Commons since Charles I seems vandalism not so much of the Commons itself as of tradition, the more so because it’s in aid of such an ignoble cause. Though I feel much the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord ...”

“... a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss politics. He played an active part in the 1880 elections to the Westminster Parliament, helping ensure that the two Conservative candidates standing in his ...”

“... in it for euphemisms.Poor Bottom, an innocently dreaming egoist, a would-be artist, becomes in the wood by night what we would now call a donkey. But that word is another 18th-century euphemism. Elizabethans would have said roundly that Bottom was an ass. And they pronounced that word exactly as they said the word ‘arse’, one of their two terms for what we ...”

“... was never absent in this last decade of their lives. 14 August. Listen to the last programme in Charles Wheeler’s Radio 4 series on National Service, a discussion with, among others, Neal Ascherson, Michael Mates and Arnold Wesker. Though my own experiences (basic training in the Infantry, then the Joint Services Russian Course) were hardly typical, I ...”