Search Results

“... one way of cheering oneself up with a new Derision Factor. ‘Where is Mrs Lear?’ once enquired George Steiner darkly. Did Shakespeare flinch from portraying what happened to old women? Or did Mrs Lear renew her youth in The Winter’s Tale and become a Paulina, a Queen ...”

“... of this animate inventory that makes Winogrand so important. Taking his lead from Georg Lukács, George Steiner wrote of Balzac that when he ‘describes a hat, he does so because a man is wearing it.’ Granted, in photography hats are forever being verbed – worn, carried, tipped – but it’s helpful to see Winogrand as a visual novelist whose work ...”

“... it persuasive. Raine takes as his opponents in this chapter Anthony Julius, Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Louis Menand, critics with very different positions on the issue, which he does his best to respect. In the end, he describes his own position as ‘reserved. We do not have all the evidence. There may be things in the correspondence.’ I ...”

“... might be. Among such artists were Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Gilbert and George and others. Many of these people disliked each other. While their individual careers developed they found that they could not teach in the same studios. By the early Seventies this wonderful department was at war with itself. Obviously a standard ...”

“... No two panels, as they are annually reconstituted, will come up with the same titles. George Steiner will not coincide in judgment with John Bayley. There is the added complication of the unpredictable preferences of the lay members of the committee – what might be called the Mary Wilson factor. At the heart of the Booker process is the ...”

“... can shift. They can further reflect that whereas in 1972 the three judges were Cyril Connolly, George Steiner and Elizabeth Bowen, in 1987 a television newscaster, by virtue of having written a biography of Viv Richards, was at least more ‘literary’ than one of the other judges. And then the novelists had better conclude that the only sensible ...”

“... a passion for literature and a commitment to making lucid sense. One must grant the contention of George Steiner in Real Presences that we as a culture need poetry and art as we will never need criticism, and it is surely a sign of what Parrinder calls ‘decadence’ to replace poetry with criticism. Nevertheless, self-consciousness and self-reflection ...”

“... has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit by’. ‘Speculation’, ‘afford’ and ‘profit’ put a poet’s pressure on ‘costive’. Yet should Davie ...”

“... are variously described (‘classic’ as against ‘modern’, for instance, or, to name names, George Eliot as against Joyce). It is probably useless to protest against the almost universal scholarly passion for periodisation: to have cardinal dates and canonical works associated with those dates is convenient, a useful fiction of which we forget the ...”

“... than those which cannot. More subtly still, a novel that attains the standing of art may, as George Eliot hoped, act as ‘the aesthetic not the doctrinal teacher’ and thereby achieve ‘the raising of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right’. Crudely, then, to simplify what we can fairly take to be the intent of those who ...”

“... such mandarins as Alfred Kazin, Gore Vidal, Benjamin de Mott and – at inordinate length – George Steiner in the New Yorker (a bite at the hand which has, most famously, fed Updike): ‘An occasion to marvel once again that not since the Periclean Greeks has there been a configuration of intellectual aptitude, spiritual breadth, and radical ...”

“... something intractable and frightening which lies at the diseased heart of European culture. George Steiner raised this matter some years ago when he observed in a letter to the Listener that the ‘obstinate puzzle’ is that Eliot’s uglier touches tend to occur at the centre of very good poetry. As Julius shows, neither Ricks in his comments on ...”

“... populated, scatters references to Conrad (Joseph), Hesiod, Rilke, Shakespeare, Plato, Mann, George Eliot, Gide and St John. Quite how much Conrad may be coruscating on thin ice here and there is a question the book can’t help posing, as do the works of his fellow polymath and mandarin critic of modernity, ...”

“... the death-of-tragedy thesis in chapters on Corneille and Racine, acknowledging the work of George Steiner, which, we are told, ‘corroborates, but overstates’ Docherty’s present argument. Finally we come to Swift’s Tale of a Tub (which prefigures contemporary critical attitudes) and to the rise of the novel. The novel is described as an ...”

“... the utter transformation announced in the epigraph from Yeats – the birth of a terrible beauty. George Steiner detected in Bernhard’s Correction not only a ‘maddening, grating recursive and tidal motion’, a description that could also be applied to Hurricane Season, but ‘a bracing, energising afterglow’. There’s no attempt at such ...”