Search Results

“... Waters and Jacques Derrida. Some of de Man’s judgments are routine – he thought very highly of Charles Morgan, for instance, as the French did in those days. He speaks well of Valéry, and that does remind us of the links between his later thought and his early interest in Symbolism. But his views on history, if he remembered them later, must have seemed ...”

“... only the extraordinary durability of her presence, as if continually incarnated afresh with the passage of time due to some occult operation of the Great Art of Light and Shade. One odd thing. As Svengali, Hank Mann had achieved a posthumous success. Although it was he who had brushed her with Stardust (she’d been a mere ‘leading player’ up till ...”

“... a whistle, but even shriller – I see Oliver Twist among A heaping of office ledgers. Go ask Charles Dickens this, How it was in London then: The old City with Dombey’s office, The yellow waters of the Thames. There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that this is indeed a book, not just a selection of the significant ...”

“... journalist and author. After well-received books on the parliamentary crisis of 1910 and on Charles Dilke, he undertook a biography of Asquith, a figure he admired and identified with. Campbell supplies a long list of characteristics the two shared, including a ‘lack of interest in speculative thought’. His standing as a serious journalist was ...”

“... aside, Bernhardt always had a soft spot, she said, for the entire Bonaparte family); Charles Haas (elegant model for Proust’s Swann); ‘Bertie’, the cuddly future Edward VII; the artist-engraver Gustave Doré; and at least one woman, the trouser-wearing sculptor Louise Abbéma. Gottlieb refers to Abbéma, somewhat ungallantly, as ...”

“... Mann seems to believe, stems from a fatal self-misunderstanding. He has in mind the boast of Charles Krauthammer and other neo-con ideologues that the US today is the most powerful polity in history. With bases in 132 countries, America has ‘the first military force deployable over the entire world’. Moreover, since 1991, it has had no ...”

“... window also opened to the garden in the autumn mornings, Ruskin does not say; but either way this passage anticipates – or perhaps actively influenced – a review which appeared in the Academy in 1906 of a performance in London, at the Aeolian Hall, by a group called the Folksong Quartet, ‘whose special business it is,’ the reviewer writes, ‘to sing ...”

“... A glimpse of what it may have meant to move even within Florence can perhaps be had from a passage in a text set down some years after The Freudian Slip. ‘Anyone with any knowledge of neurosis, which need not be that of a psychiatrist but may be that of a “victim”, knows that agoraphobia can be “overcome” in a number of ways. One may succeed ...”

“... ritardando, but in the extant films of their performances, Mravinsky’s physical gestures in this passage are never the same.The quality of a conductor’s abilities is only discernible by inference from the music. Films of conducting with the sound turned off are quite weird (try it with Bernstein or Rattle conducting the end of Mahler’s Second ...”

“... queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room ...”

“... of Austria. That is, he was named after, or had usurped and was allowed the name of, the son of Charles V and victor of the battle of Lepanto – the short-lived, but symbolically important, sea victory of Spain over Islam two generations earlier. He was a fool called Don Juan of Austria. ‘The Jester Named Don Juan of Austria’ (1633) What did it ...”

“... ships and transported to the American colonies, where they – or those who survived the Middle Passage – were sold at auction, stripped naked for the perusal of prospective buyers. With the defeat of the South in the Civil War – by 1804, all the northern states had abolished slavery – four million slaves won their freedom. Under the protection of ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... the 1801 Act of Union – ‘not Protestant landlords. Again, few Irish Members opposed the passage of the Gregory clause in Westminster. There is ample scope for further research here by cultural, social and local historians.’Ample indeed. In the early Forties Eamon de Valera, who had been brought up in Co. Clare, a part of Ireland deeply affected by ...”

“... of Spirit; but ‘in order to become genuine knowledge … it must travel a long way and work its passage.’ You won’t learn much if you approach learning as an easy and straightforward matter, ‘shot from a pistol’ as Hegel put it. Learning is agonistic, deathly struggle. Learning is also life itself.The young Rose chose to do her DPhil on Theodor ...”