Search Results

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... bank or shopping mall is handy. The heroine’s name combines a plant with a character from Thomas Hardy: Katniss Everdeen. If you frivolously mishear it as Catnip, as I did, you can be reassured: that’s what a friend calls her in the novel. The chief bad guy is called Coriolanus, and the place where it all happens, to quote the first book, is a ...”

“... twist, or are taken down to an altogether deeper level of thought. In Volume I, McCloskey and R.P. Thomas measure the cost to the American colonists of trade control by the British Navigation Acts, and end up with the figure of under 1.8 per cent of colonial income: a new low. As a price to pay for the services of British military forces, participation in ...”

“... to Browning criticism ever since. It supplies the thesis of the most recent biography of the poet, Donald Thomas’s quietly lucid and understanding Life within Life: the best and most straightforward of the modern lives of Browning. Similarly, it may dictate the title and theme of Constance Hassett’s sensitive study of Browning’s verse as an ...”

“... and Austria were demanding to know: should they use force to stop them, or let them proceed? Thomas de Mazière, her interior minister, was at home ill. Seehofer, still furious at Merkel’s failure to attend the celebration of what would have been the CSU deity Franz-Josef Strauss’s 100th birthday, had switched off his phone. Merkel, watching on her ...”

“... is appropriate, when not. The influences – Hopkins in ‘George Chapman – The Iliad’, Edward Thomas in ‘On Foscombe Hill’ and ‘Up There’ and possibly ‘Imitation’, Jonson in ‘We Who Praise Poets’, Whitman and possibly D.H. Lawrence in ‘Felling a Tree’ – are discernible but never for certain, because so thoroughly assimilated and ...”

“... recognisably ‘traditional’ book and enables us to identify two important early influences: Donald Davie and Charles Olson. The rest of his work has appeared from small presses and in little magazines. It has been regular and prolific: more than two dozen books or pamphlets to date, of which two – Pearls that Were and Triodes – appeared last year ...”

“... forces have not been rebuilt.’ On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’ I heard that Condoleezza Rice asked: ‘How do you capitalise on these opportunities?’ I heard that on 17 ...”

“... Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is ...”

“... lavish patronage since its founding in 1974. At first, it favoured Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and installation artists such as Walter de Maria and James Turrell, and certainly the early projects underwritten by Dia, from permanent exhibitions in New York City to massive earthworks in the American desert, were grand. Among the ...”

“... his own version of events to put right the lies in the newspapers. He imagines she intends it for Donald Cameron, a politician who appears to be, if not sympathetic to the Kellys, at least critical of the police. But: she took my scabbed hard hand placing it ever so gently on her belly. And I knew before she said the words I knew that it were you in there ...”

“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... in Life by Other Means are warm in their praise of Enright’s sanity, humanity and intelligence. Donald Davie agrees that Enright is ‘deeply humane, indeed humanitarian’, but then argues that this humanitarianism continually inhibits his poetry. Davie suggests that the pressure of the responsibilities entailed on Enright by his refusal to accept the ...”

“... One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known, post-Apocalypse poem ‘The Horses’ and Austin Clarke’s much less familiar ‘Forget me not’, a poem written out of Clarke’s angry response to the Irish trade in horse meat in the 1950s ...”