Search Results

“... at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’...”

“... strongman squatting on my bed. He sees me too; from beneath his shaggy brow he rolls a liquid eye. Brown-skinned, naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species, he is bouncing on his heels and smoking furiously without taking the cigarette from his lips: puff, bounce, puff, bounce. What rubbish, I think, actually shouting at myself, but ...”

“... hostility, especially from those whose children had failed the 11+ or were thought likely to do so. While most conceded that they were indeed good schools, such good, it was argued, was outweighed by the damage they did to the majority who went instead to those symbols of failure, the secondary moderns. The 1944 Act thus left England with a state school ...”

“... Juárez is very calm. Boring even. We used to have fifteen or twenty deaths a day. Now it’s just three, five, seven.’ The term ‘boring’ is relative. The first cover of PM that I see shows a photograph of a corpse whose head is no more than a skull: the man was burned with acid ‘while still alive’, the article says. It gives the usual ...”

“... from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book ...”

“... hard-to-get nutrients. Illusions as to the value of revered works of literature need every so often to be dispelled, even if it means that some people swear off the canon altogether. For most others, the results aren’t likely to be so decisive or long-lasting. Like the warnings issued about cigarettes, the cautions ...”

“... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his ...”

“... published as Anticipations. His friend Arnold Bennett referred to them mockingly as ‘Uncle’s-dissipations’, but for Wells futurology was anything but a sideline. In fact he was tempted to regard the scientific romances and humorous journalism with which he had made his mark in the Nineties as little more than dissipations. 1900 was not a peaceful ...”

“... hear a friend of his read. I had come to hear the Minister for the Arts describe the Government’s support for literature. At 7 p.m., as the Minister began to speak, Seth looked nonplussed and started for the door. It was too late, he was trapped.I knew it was Vikram Seth because I had studied his face on the jacket of An Equal Music. The night before, I had ...”

“... runs the oldest-established permanent floating crap game in New York; or it might recall Lessing’s play, Nathan the Wise, about the good Jew making peace between Muslim and Christian in the Holy Land. But really Michael Wharton, in his ‘Peter Simple’ role, is more like the original prophet Nathan, telling an interesting little fable which abruptly ...”

“... by about 20 per cent a year. But they are probably too expensive for you. A standard-issue SS dress dagger is worth at least $1500. A lock of Eva Braun’s hair will cost you $3500. A small watercolour possibly by Hitler will cost you roughly $4500. The 1938 Mercedes which he gave to Eva Braun may cost you ...”

“... indeed we are all Ruritanians now. These fears weren’t formulated in response to George Konrad’s hefty new book, but they might have been. I don’t know when I last felt so mutinous while reading a book. A Feast in the Garden is an absolutely dire novel, misconceived, opportunistic, inflated, poorly written, cynical and ...”

“... on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man. An unaccompanied woman could only attend a matinée. At ...”

“... which British journalists regularly confuse with the Declaration of Independence, is calibrated so as to correct the arithmetical simplicities of an undifferentiated popular will. The Presidential election of 2000 introduced the world not only to the vagaries of the franchise in Florida, user-unfriendly butterfly ballots, and the arcana of chad ...”

“... would settle the Scottish Question, and conveniently kill off the nationalist threat to Labour’s Scottish stronghold. It was unseemly, however, to express such sentiments in the raw. Home Rule was a momentous constitutional reform, and New Labour’s radicalism in this area was to be properly celebrated as such (not ...”