Search Results

“... Walter Benjamin once remarked that what drove men and women to revolt was not dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living ...”

“... the West since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title. Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx broke ...”

“... hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top ...”

“... circle. Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery (2009) tells the story of a stylish New York couple through an auction catalogue of their possessions (his vintage martini shaker, her silver cake slicer). The Native Trees of Canada (2010) reproduces images ...”

“... have not deepened his regard for his subject, wonders whether she was in the same league as Walter Arensberg or the Cone sisters or other collectors who devoted more years of their life to buying paintings, and perhaps exercised more independent judgment in doing so. This isn’t a question which need detain us here. What gives her collection more ...”

“... and inconsequence. Love in a Life offers anecdotes in search of a narrative. Death, as Walter Benjamin implied, gives life to stories, and intimations of mortality recur in Motion’s anecdotes. The opening poem evokes, with hallucinatory vividness, a dream-vision of ‘last century’s man ... / (spats and port waistcoat / in clackety ...”

“... confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room ...”

“... period of role-reversal designed to make the system more tolerable to the majority. Long before Walter Bagehot, the Venetians had realised the importance of the separation between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the political system, and the doge, that ‘sacred central symbol’ which the Florentines lacked, performed the function of ...”

“... Some of the fragments are tiny: the shortest such disconnected paragraph is the apothegmatically Walter Benjaminish ‘Only one typographer in all of Paris could decipher Balzac’s revised galley proofs.’ There are funny episodes and excursions – a showdown over her roommate’s snoring, a trip to Filene’s Basement to buy a ‘Gogolian’ overcoat, an ...”

“... like Blake, Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones; and everyone from Whistler to Yeats – there were many – whose imaginations were shifted or shaped by his ideas and practice. Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a ...”

“... interested in Taylor’s more orthodox poems, which he valued, as would any good friend of Sir Walter Scott, as a source of quaint details about everyday life in Jacobean London. Malcolm’s proposal of an unbroken, overarching historical trajectory of nonsense stretching from the Renaissance to the Victorians looks equally shaky in the other ...”

“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with his ...”

“... Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery, and in 2011 she worked with the illustrator Clare Rojas on a children’s book called We Need a Horse. That year, Heti also began a novel, The Moral Development of Misha, about her friend Misha ...”

“... where the additions, now lost, seem to have been in the style of the Olden Times, popularised by Walter Scott’s Abbotsford. Then there was a Tudoresque village school and a schoolmaster’s house in the Pompeian style. Uglow is more surprised than she need be by this last, for the excavations at Pompeii, which the Loshes had visited, had been inspiring ...”

“... and for the English and those aspiring to Englishness that generally meant the Tudors, who, from Walter Scott’s Kenilworth to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, still stand in the national imagination for History with a capital H. Among the most important rescued buildings Tinniswood discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up ...”