Search Results

“... on one side, Unitarian on the other. All three Trevelyan brothers were unbelievers, but with George it was much more than mere absence of belief, it was a creed in its own right. ‘Two terrible things have happened this week,’ he was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned ...”

“... to live in the city would have been seen as just a little weird’. She gathered the dominant urban ideas of the era together into a scathing portmanteau: ‘Radiant Garden City Beautiful’. Its components were Le Corbusier’s mid-1930s ‘Radiant City’, a vision of a city of towers in landscaped parkland, where housing was rigorously zoned to ...”

“... days of his success, his black-faced, mammy-singing disciples included not only Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard ...”

“... that won’t let him be, and he tries to draw out its meaning. He was fascinated by walls as an urban motif, walls so thin you can hear the neighbours yelling at their kids, walls that make you feel at home, crumbling walls with broken windows.DeCarava distrusted the binary notion of ‘black and white’ photography. He didn’t believe in a distinction ...”

“... Burra. Burra’s big watercolour The Straw Man (1963) – showing a group of male figures on urban wasteland, involved in some kind of ritual dance or game with a sinister undertow – has qualities Pasmore lacks: energy, wit and particularity. The last section of Towards a New Reality is the most satisfying. Covering Pasmore’s Constructivist phase and ...”

“... illustrations. The result was a book which is still full of important insights about 19th-century urban Britain that remain to be explored, and of ideas for factual enquiry that remain to be exploited. Here is what Dyos and Wolff had to say about their subtitle: We do not see in one camp the historians of fact all brimming with realities and in another the ...”

“... fads and the highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too ...”

“... about Paris but about other cities, and about the business of thinking about cities. It explores urban perspectives high and low, hills, towers, sewers, markets, parks, canals, boulevards, barricades, shops, taking as its witnesses chiefly poets and novelists but also painters and photographers, and the authors of ...”

“... is high-contrast black and white, best set the scene for his paintings. The paintings of George Bellows, say, who earlier recorded the look of urban America, do not imply narratives in the way Hopper’s do. His magazine illustrations and the drawings he made for his paintings have much in common. Both make you ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... Middle East, or those of America, now in a deep recession, plagued by poverty, joblessness, and an urban, education and health crisis of gigantic proportions. A war like this could only have occurred in a part of the world beset with huge inequities of endowment and rule, bearing within itself a history of promises postponed and endlessly betrayed for justice ...”

“... is not necessarily greatest in imagining freedom: or rather, as in Ann Schlee’s novel and George Konrad’s, it is where social and psychological pressures are most intense that we get from art our purest expressions of freedom. In 1981 Ann Schlee published her first adult novel, Rhine Journey, a closely researched account of a strait-laced English ...”

“... for the spectator. A marvellous example is ‘Dark Ages’, which celebrates quasi-affluent urban squalor – ‘our heraldry of dirt’ – in the terms and images appropriate to allegorical design, and to the ages of faith or enacted stability which talked and pictured in its terms. This is our heraldry of dirt: a dog crappant on a lawn vert. A ...”

“... Who would have thought it? George W. Bush as President. I almost forgot what nauseated disbelief was like: I had not felt it so intensely since Reagan won in 1980. You look around, dazed and confused, and wonder: how did this happen? What is this country that elected this man as its President? (That is, if it did elect him: we still don’t know what happened in Florida, and we may never really know ...”

“... of The Rainbow’s, tracing the historical mutations of a locality from its natural to its urban (here 1930s) condition. The theme of the novel has other evident similarities with Sons and Lovers. Both deal with the emergence of artistic talent from working-class fetters. But in the way that he has chosen to tell A Prodigal Child, Storey defies ...”