Search Results

“... recorded for the edification of the future and the gratification of the present. The puritanical Richard Ingrams, who neither smokes nor drinks, and lives a scandalously chaste life, appears to many like some rumpled, corduroy-jacketed Robespierre (though Robespierre was a sybarite by comparison, diluting his water with wine). How has this change come ...”

“... and figures to demonstrate that he is, as his publisher’s publicity has it, ‘Britain’s most-read and best-known psychologist’. As part of his evidence, he lists his 71 books published through 1989, and presents a graph showing that he has also produced some eight hundred articles and chapters. This astonishing output, from a part-time writer who also ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... The Barbara Pym story is possibly better-known than any of her novels, widely though these are now read. During the decade after 1950 she brought out half a dozen books, which were well received and found a steady if small reading public. But in 1963 her publisher, Cape, turned down her new novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, and she stayed unpublished until 1977 ...”

“... Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and ...”

“... There is already a lot of biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it anyway, quotations and all ...”

“... or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing mother to stay in his flat in Swiss Cottage. Before she arrives he ...”

“... been provoked in part by the text of the now dead Yuri Zhivago’s notebook, ‘which they had read many times and half of which they knew by heart’. Does the irony include the castigator of the ordinary too? It’s true he castigates them only in his mind, telling them silently that ‘the only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same ...”

“... South Carolina. He studied with the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, but abandoned postgraduate study after deciding that fiction offered a more fruitful way of thinking about how ‘meaning gets constructed’. ‘I start with something that bugs me, some philosophical problem,’ he has ...”

“... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...”

“... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...”

“... Michael Ayers, how many contributors to this issue of the Review, reviewers or reviewees, have read Locke’s Essay, word for word, from beginning to end? Fewer, perhaps, than would like to admit it. But Locke rules. No matter how briefly he is skimmed or how conveniently abridged, he set an agenda which after three centuries shows no signs of fading. It ...”

“... me into his drawing-room, though without offering me a chair, and himself sat down and began to read. Never before or since have I seen anyone so slowly and yet so inexorably come to the boil. His face flushed, his back straightened, and his eyes widened. Then he rose to his feet, and finally he exploded. ‘If this article is published, young man I shall ...”

“... three-dimensional. And it isn’t always in very good taste. Yet despite some paragraphs that read like an architectural Hello!, Girouard’s inclusive approach is entirely vindicated as the book gathers momentum. Big Jim offers the best insight into the architectural process, the gestation, design and construction of buildings, seen from over the ...”

“... and ‘was more easily removed from nose and cheeks’. And it is a long time since I read anything as funny as his mock-serious discussion of flatulence, and in particular of the potentially disastrous consequences of farting in a space vehicle. Richard Olney, an American expert on food and wine who has lived ...”