Search Results

“... disadvantages are too obvious to dwell upon for more than a moment. Weighing about half a stone, it brings the total of pages in this Collected Edition to something over 3500, and the total cost to £170. Not many readers will have desks large enough to do as the editors pleasantly imagine they might, and have all the volumes open at once. The ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... was exhausted while I was awake; I was eating more than usual but within three weeks had lost a stone and a half in weight, and couldn’t put it back on for more than a year. Later I developed blurred vision in my right eye, tinnitus in my right ear and recurrent insomnia. More frightening than any of this was the fact that I found it very difficult to ...”

“... most fulfilled by leaders who are, or at least resemble, movie stars ... No less an expert than Richard Nixon assured Elvis that he had the power over people’s imaginations that would enable him to obtain high office ... In truth, Elvis aspired to an office higher than that occupied by any president. He viewed himself as one who ruled the world by virtue ...”

“... distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?’ The old philosophers thought not, but Richard Gregory and subsequent workers have told more complex stories about recovery from blindness. We do not need philosophers to become engrossed. The one non-spiritual goal of Christ’s ministry was the curing of blindness, and every evangelist describes ...”

“... which begins, ‘Long night succeeds thy little day;/O blighted blossom! can it be/That this gray stone and grassy clay/Have closed our anxious care of thee?’ The vicar of Shepperton church, where she was buried, objected to the first line because it made no provision for immortal life; he and Peacock quarrelled bitterly over it. Jane went mad with ...”

“... also ‘full of threatening silences ... we stand before the Ariel poems as Olwyn stood before the stone-faced Sylvia.’ But there are silent men in this story, as well as silent women. Malcolm never meets Ted Hughes, although she finds ‘a kind of Chekhovian large-heartedness and melancholy’ in his letters. He has remained silent about Plath out of ...”

“... to his cost, was not his strong suit. Hamilton’s obituarists were not timid in their assessment: Richard Dawkins called him ‘a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin’. His most important contribution was a Darwinian explanation of altruism, a problem over which Darwin himself admitted to having had sleepless ...”

“... of his most famous photographs: the cyclist caught gliding down a cobbled hill at the base of some stone steps in Hyères, and the man jumping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, captured in mid-air and reflected perfectly in the water, the pitched roof of the station behind him shrouded in mist. Madrid, 1933 Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932 ...”

“... variously but far from exhaustively – Arnold Toynbee, A.J.P. Taylor, Maurice Cowling, Lawrence Stone and the Cerberus of Scottish historiography, William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the previous ...”

“... and the university; about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed ...”

“... Bibles into heathen lands. He wrote back, suggesting I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ, and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first ...”

“... dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half ...”

“... an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by Philip Johnson in 1964, the second by ...”

“... particular speciality of Hilliard’s, who wished to give ‘the true lustre to pearl and precious stone’ so that ‘it seemeth to be the thing itself’ – but Goldring has a harder job to achieve a comparable close-up of the man himself, who is elusive in ways that go beyond the usual patchiness of evidence after the passage of centuries.Like many of the ...”