Search Results

“... The Structure of Complex Words:                  For            I.A. RICHARDS     Who is the source of all ideas in this book, even the minor ones arrived       at by disagreeing with him And I should have wished that the amazing F.R. Leavis/Q.D. Leavis selves-congratulations, happily here, might have enjoyed the ...”

“... bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High School the opening pair of Lee Irvine and Barry Richards had century or double-century partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been waiting to ...”

“... Dombey employs Polly Toodle as a wet-nurse for his motherless baby. Polly Toodle must be called ‘Richards’ to get rid of the ridiculous low-class appellation, and to separate her from her family. Mr Dombey is very anxious to treat their agreement as ‘a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting’, and is determined to keep the nurse and his ...”

“... a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in which Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was ...”

“... the BBC under Reith used the appeal of Empire to establish its own status and popularity. Jeffrey Richards writes about images of Empire in British and American films of the Thirties, Stephen Constantine about the Empire Marketing Board, whose activities ranged from a pamphlet on ‘The Behaviour and Diseases of the Banana in Storage and Transport’ to John ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the BBC, the play got its perfect casting – Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at ...”

“... room was packed out. There was kudos attached to this. Everyone in Cambridge knew that when I.A. Richards gave the lectures that became his book Practical Criticism he attracted audiences so large they couldn’t fit into the lecture hall. In the course of a career that allowed him plenty of time for reading and writing – he wasn’t one to be corralled ...”

“... or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion from ...”

“... of ‘criticism’ as the dominant approach in the 1920s and 1930s, whether in the form of I.A. Richards’s ‘practical criticism’ in the UK or the New Critics’ ‘close reading’ in the US. This is when, in his view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all ...”

“... power of close reading began when he was a student at Yale in the late 1930s in the era of I.A. Richards and the New Criticism, which held that the meaning of a poem came from the poem itself, and was completely independent of the history of the poet. Indeed, it was hardly necessary to know even the name of the poet. Done right, the New Criticism teased out ...”

“... he a gross libel on the dead, but which is a gem of public-school literature, and his essay on David Alton (‘Lord Alton of Knitting Needle’) is one of the most ferocious pieces I have ever read. Centre journalists doubtless did not like it, but it is enough in itself to make the book worth possessing. There is also a peculiarly successful ...”

“... form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up where religion had left off. As I.A. Richards remarked with stunning off-handedness, it was perfectly capable of saving us. It was no accident that this exalted vision of art grew stronger with the advent of industrial capitalism. The artwork was the enemy of industrial production because it was an ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... the claim made here by Fiona Stafford that Blair addresses the central questions later put by I.A. Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism with the ‘zealous optimism of a pioneer’ is certainly plausible, and his sense of criticism as an active dialogic process in which the ability to persuade and converse was of the greatest importance, goes some way ...”