Search Results

“... About ten years ago I went to see Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in the West End. The play has been revived, and rewritten, many times since its first run in 1982 and its place in the farcical canon is undisputed. One consequence of its (entirely deserved) reputation for being hilarious is that audiences strongly expect it to make them laugh ...”

“... to the artists about whom he wrote: Blake, Poussin, Borromini. In this account, Blake is the young man’s artist. Carter makes no comment on this: her book provides a limited account of Blunt’s work as an art historian. But she does make it quite clear that Blunt was attracted by Poussin long before he took an interest in Blake. His most significant ...”

“... simple remedies and evangelical tone. But her confident certainties are echoed on the other side: Michael Foot condemns her for praising Victorian values ‘without even a passing comprehension of the human suffering and indignity which the mass of our people had to endure in that pre-democratic age’. The term ‘Victorian’ is used purely descriptively in ...”

“... a classroom text in Ireland and abroad, is explicitly about the Belfast of the Troubles. Its hero, Michael, is a failed poet turned Belfast hotel manager. One day he decides he will finally tell his wife that he is leaving her. But that evening the IRA take them both captive and compel him to drive a bomb into his hotel car park to assassinate an Ian Paisley ...”

“... Kallman in tow) pressed his suit on whatever composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”

“... picture etc in the National Socialist newspapers on exhibit. The town was dominated by the type of young person who walks through the streets vaguely determined, offering the Roman salute.’ Cultural greatness in decline and the juxtaposition of Goethe with Hitler – these are the two narrative axes along which ...”

“... says he spends more time on soccer than in his office. God knows why, he exclaims with a grin. Two young co-ordinators, street lads who look as tough as hell, flip through the membership cards of their group and nod seriously at Ahmad’s instructions. The old pattern of local football clubs everywhere: businessmen and shopkeepers on one side, working classes ...”

“... Michael Kelly has produced a vivid, responsible account of his own itinerary, as a contributor to New Republic, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, through the Gulf War: from Baghdad to Amman; on to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Saudi Arabia; into Kuwait and back into Iraq, via Basra; thence to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra ...”

“... justify all of Naipaul’s intensities and obsessions. These eight pieces – a long one on the Michael X murders in Trinidad, five on Argentina and Uruguay, one on the Congo and one on Joseph Conrad – are held together by Conradian preoccupations. They represent an ‘effort of thought and sympathy’, an effort that ‘does not stop with the aspect of ...”

“... wrong with it. After all, an institution which manages to upset Mr Tony Benn, Lady Falkender, Mr Michael Meacher, Mr Joe Haines, the editor of the Spectator and the sub-editors of the Daily Express cannot be all bad; and from there it is a small step to conclude that it must be all, or nearly all, good. The step is a dangerous one, however, and readers of ...”

“... Tigrinya] and did not speak more Arabic than I do, but had with him an interpreter named Michael’. The second critic was ‘Dofter Esther’, an elderly cleric, who observed that the traveller ‘did not speak the Tigr language nor much Amharic’. Bredin also follows Bruce in claiming that he was appointed commander of the royal ...”

“... the Fleet manoeuvres of September 1898 he recited some of his verses at a ship’s concert. The young men who then carried him shoulder high round the quarterdeck had little taste for nice discriminations. Fortunately their loud voices could sometimes be drowned by Indian echoes. The effects of the Lahore Club were not wholly had. There would have been no ...”

“... in the plot, or one for two hours of the movie and another for five minutes. She is the dim young thing that Newland and the narrator think she is (‘she had died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own’), until the sudden switch comes. Then she is the awesome infant matriarch, the enveloping mother who ...”

“... the like. Another important effect in Fanny’s initiation ceremony is that its setting – six young people in an elegant, brilliantly-lit drawing-room watching two others copulating – underlines the power of the orgasm. Each of the girls becomes completely absorbed as she copulates, and reaches a ravishing climax – in Fanny’s case twice, inducing a ...”

“... living alone, and the increase in women’s marrying age. It is reasonable to suppose that for young nurses, hospital orderlies and tea ladies increasingly living on their own or bringing up children on their own, the old pattern of rational acquiescence in low pay has become irrational. And dishonourable. From being an interlude, public-sector employment ...”