Search Results

“... and the difference in style was striking. Set beside the early work of Pound and Eliot (or of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, for that matter), Frost’s ‘simple’ lyrics might have seemed to be some sort of throwback – as if they belonged far down the back slope of the great Modernist watershed. But ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... ambitious and interesting buildings of the C14 in Suffolk. It was built during the rule of prior William Geytone (1311-32). Its historical importance lies in the fact that the heraldry which is so lavishly displayed on it proves a date of c.1320 and that it is the earliest datable building with flushwork decoration in Suffolk … Nor is the decoration used ...”

“... the elected government over a barrel’); about miscarriages of justice (Kincora, Colin Wallace, Judith Ward); about ministerial sleaze and mendacity (Jonathan Aitken ‘was lying all right, but he was lying with such charm, verve and enthusiasm that he looked and sounded like a winner’); about the wrongdoings of the secret service; about the ...”

“... living rooms? And was there really a difference in kind between the Russell-Cotes Museum and the Wallace Collection, other than the fact that Hertford House and all those Fragonards and Watteaus had cost a great deal more than East Cliff Hall with its Landseers and Edwin Longs? And what about Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda in the ...”

“... and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It ...”

“... Paz’s recurring references are to Baudelaire and Nerval, but his work is often close to that of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Weinberger tells us that when he (correctly) identified a touch of Whitman in the title and rhythms of the poem ‘I Speak of the City’, Paz said: ‘No, I was thinking of Langston ...”

“... born. By 1936, when its first anthology was published, the names of contributors included Pound, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. For 35 years Pound advised, instructed, cajoled, abused, while Laughlin for the most part acted on the good advice, ignored the bad, and behaved with a ...”

“... if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the nails and the blood running down his arms and toes, there might also have been a question of something happening. Mrs ...”

“... rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to ...”

“... of super blood moons; a candida overgrowth message board; riffs on ‘This Is Just to Say’ by William Carlos Williams; the concept of a ‘nootropic’; a photograph of a Chihuahua standing on a man’s erection. In panel discussions, she tries and fails to explain why sneezing is funnier when it’s spelled ‘sneazing’.The portal is infested with the ...”

“... the corridors of power and the demi-monde of poets’ pubs. Like the Eliot he admires and the Wallace Stevens he deplores, you wouldn’t think he was a poet, to look at him: ‘When I am deposited at my desk I become, as nearly as may be, purely functional.’ But his office is in St James’s Square, and a seductive symbol can be seen from the ...”

“... introduced on 15 July and swiftly passed into law on 2 August, the last day of the session. William Dyce’s ‘Pegwell Bay’ (1858) Thus 1858 was fated to be famous in British history principally for the Great Stink, as it was known. Not otherwise a particularly significant year, it is the perfect subject for a microhistory. Great events cast ...”

“... writer represented here: the Library has significant Modernist holdings (Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens – none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and Jack London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The ...”

“... power, trope, work: these are the key terms of American pragmatism, found in Emerson and William James, to which Poirier would render literature accountable. They amount to an emphasis on the energetic process whereby meanings are created, opposed and altered in writing and reading. Emerson once said that the permanence of all books is determined by ...”