Search Results

“... a different and much longer book. Nevertheless, I wish it. The wish is almost gratified by Cairns Craig. He does not write with the clarity and panache of Graham Hough and his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the ...”

“... Clyde in the early 20th century was in large part its creation. In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election which suspiciously lists some of the things organised by the ILP: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics ...”

“... goes), did so by ‘imitating’ men and their modes, even to the extent of calling themselves George Eliot, or Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell. (Odd that the imitators should be inimitable.) No applause for authors laying claim to a tradition, and working within it: just a demand that gender should proclaim itself all over the prose. (Try applying this ...”

“... its intended purpose because we had to keep the windows open to avoid death by poison gas. George McGovern was running for President, Edward Heath was prime minister, and our landlord had yet to discover how to make water hot. Sick dialogue came easy in Norwich. What Ian always had was a great library, an ominous tide of titles that splashed out of ...”

“... in a big federal fraud trial the previous day. The federal detective in charge of the case was George Wool, and his deputy was Larry Park. Both men told us how, on the day after Archer gave evidence, they were contacted at lunchtime by a Toronto policeman who said he’d got a suspected shoplifter in the station. The prisoner claimed to be Jeffrey ...”

“... who they are. The story of Duluth, such as it is, concerns characters like the socialite Chloris Craig, who publishes novels under the name ‘Chloris Craig’, and Lieutenant Darlene Ecks, a member of the Police Department who specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big ...”

“... is being seen as the decisive factor. Contrary to the publishers’ blurb, Newton Minow and Craig LaMay’s book is not the first account of the history of the debates (Alan Schroeder’s Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, first published in 2001, has just been updated and reissued). But Minow, as former head of the Federal ...”

“... is a public figure. Hofmann’s book comes in the footsteps of Tony Harrison’s Continuous, Craig Raine’s Rich, Paul Muldoon’s Quoof and Hugo Williams’s Letters Home, all of which voyage round the paterfamilias: that tradition is much more pious and affectionate. The Williams offers the closest comparison: it too is about an overbearing ...”

“... at one time or another; and the fourth contains spirited appraisals of literary figures like George Moore and James Stephens. Poetry in the Wars is notable for its alertness and assiduity. Edna Longley is a formidable critic, and never better than when she’s proposing a revaluation of someone wrongly discounted, like Edward Thomas. The first two essays ...”

“... of pique brought on by Aitken. Suez ensues. Daniel Green presents a blunter Bunter – not William George, but his supposed great-grandfather William Frederick Augustus. Enumerating the moral flaws which delineate Frank Richards’s classic character, Patrick Weymouth mentions greed, pride, sloth, envy and avarice (the last two unjustly), but leaves lust out ...”

“... war-demolished houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are ...”

“... incidents from childhood and late adolescence in which she was sexually molested by Gerald and George Duckworth, the Stephen sisters’ half-brothers by their mother’s first marriage. Poole drew on these memoirs, on a letter in which Woolf recalled George Duckworth ‘fondling’ her over her Greek lessons, and on the ...”

“... visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I turn, deliberately, from this last sentence to George Steiner – who, on a television programme last November, discussed the case of Eliot and that of Ezra Pound with Professor Ricks, Annie Cohen-Solal and Clive James. Professor Steiner began by discomfiting Ricks: there were, he remarked humorously, two ...”

“... in and out of the lives of various figures in these years. He was a friend of W.B. Yeats’s wife, George, and of Joyce’s wife, Nora; he corresponded with Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a poem to him. Richard Aldington called him ‘a paradox of a man if ever there was one. He looked like a priest in civvies.’ McGreevy chatted and gossiped a lot, knew a ...”

“... hence the justification of writing books about books, in the hope of straightening things out. Craig Raine has made several attempts, over more than thirty years, to straighten things out in favour of Eliot’s reputation. He has published six essays, by my count, towards that end, starting with an appreciation of The Waste Land in 1973. This was included ...”