Search Results

“... view of human development. The lizards who developed parthenogenesis at once collected an enormous short-term advantage: by avoiding all the dangers and uncertainties of sexual reproduction, they solved the problem of keeping the species going. But in the long term, the solution must lead to extinction. The gene pool is not mixed, healthy mutation and ...”

“... sin. This is emphatically what doesn’t interest Amis or Adair. The movie controversy, in short, highlights the fact that the real source of Nabokov’s staying power lies elsewhere, in the words on the page. Readers and re-writers read Lolita for its expertise in unrealities – its literariness, its exploration of the questionable and disintegrating ...”

“... of propped up, terminally ill consumptive girls (they couldn’t lie down because it made them short of breath). The Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo has some fine examples. Unlike The Scream, they are not surrounded by crowds of tourists, even if one of the best of them, The Sick Child, is also by Munch. As an adolescent, he had witnessed the slow death from ...”

“... thing. When he started writing to Bann he was almost forty and an intermittently published short-story writer, playwright and poet. He had just published Rapel: Ten Fauve and Suprematist Poems (1963), his first foray into the new medium of concrete poetry, but most of his work as an artist lay ahead, as did the ‘avant-gardening’ of Little Sparta in ...”

“... he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his ...”

“... as heinous as those committed in the name of a god or gods. Considering that secularism has such a short history – less than three centuries – the secular-minded have been catching up with religious violence rather assiduously. Sébastian-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, a writer who managed to preserve his sense of humour despite his close acquaintance with the ...”

“... data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 ...”

“... Levi as recorder over that of storyteller is to distort his achievement. Levi wrote at least three short stories before the war (two, ‘Lead’ and ‘Mercury’, can be found in The Periodic Table; the third was published for the first time in Angier’s biography, The Double Bond, in 2002). Although he insisted that before the publication of what he called ...”

“... London at the time. The most famous was Toynbee Hall, whose secretary Attlee would be for a short period in 1909-10. The paternalistic idea behind the settlement movement was that the urban working class would benefit from having university graduates live among them: they would provide uplifting social, moral and aesthetic leadership of the sort ...”

“... goings-on’ (a chapter from A Glass of Blessings was included in the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories). Her gay men ironise femininity, break the rules of decorum and make light of deep feeling. Mervyn Cantrell, the caustic and gossipy librarian who lives at home with his mother, shamelessly lusts after Ianthe Broome’s Pembroke table in An ...”

“... the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled the past queen, who had done so little for his hero, in order to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal ...”

“... and make your Holocaust victim an unusual souvenir of a memorable Sunday afternoon? Or maybe, as Philip Gourevitch observed, just throw it away as you leave the show? After all, the museum Holocaust experience always comes to an end, and your victim can easily be dumped with the trash when you’re safely back in the sunshine – a neat replay of ...”

“... in English have either stopped half-way (like Francis Steegmuller) or been too brief (like Philip Spencer); the most recommendable version of Flaubert’s life in recent years has been disguised as the two-volume Steegmuller edition of the Letters. Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of Camus. Pre-eminently a dredger and sifter, an ...”

“... writing, the thing that can be learnt on the campus, ‘the consequences’, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic, and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’. Gay Clifford was an academic, and by all accounts a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at ...”

“... on the cover), nor even a biographical essay (as the author claims in the introduction), but a short, balanced and intelligent account of Franco’s long reign. The author seems to have encountered the traditional difficulty of finding anything original to say about the dictator’s domestic life and relies heavily on the published memoirs of Franco’s ...”