Search Results

“... Voyage of the ‘Beagle’, but functions more as a travelogue of truncated dreams. This would be fine if it was written with self-conscious humour, but Sacks continually tries to redeem the minor key of the story with grand claims for what to the lay reader seems only a mildly interesting situation. Colour-blindness – complete achromatopsia, seeing no ...”

“... by the search for abstract concepts. The dividing line between bricolage and plagiarism is a fine one, and the case of Sterne – and of De Quincey and Coleridge after him – is still in many ways unresolved. Sterne aficionados tend to see the joke as being on Ferriar, especially since Sterne obliquely signalled his debt by choosing as epigraphs for ...”

“... Orwell it is sometimes, paradoxically, so artful as to seem mannered. It is, in its way, a kind of fine writing. But it is fine, and shows up what is not. Though Shelden understands something of that, his own prose, soft and enervated, shows up badly in comparison. Here is a passage in which he happens to be analysing and ...”

“... teenage rogues, of sweet grannies and daddies dying, of different cultures rubbing along just fine, and of the bewildered male emerging bruised and battered but with his dignity intact. It’s emotional sushi, and Parsons knows it. In One for My Baby, Alfie’s father is the author of his own widely acclaimed publishing sensation, a memoir, Oranges for ...”

“... could fail to recognise her distinction and authority; it was in the carriage of her head, in her fine hands, in her voice, in every word she uttered in any language, in her brilliant, very piercing eyes.’ Cather compares Grout’s way of speaking about Sentimental Education to Garibaldi rallying his soldiers on the retreat from Rome. A less heroic ...”

“... centuries of metal wheels, horseshoes and the clomping of clogs on cobbles, although if you were fine enough folk the local authorities would lay straw outside your house while you were in your bed dying. And the bells, the bells … Keizer quotes the women of Aurillac in central France, who in 1896 petitioned against their church’s tenor bell, which was ...”

“... four million people inhabiting a far away country of which we know fuck all, if we can save a few bob for our ailing small businesses? Germany insisted on the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia in early 1992 because the European Community was committed to the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris, both of which affirm the right of ...”

“... postwar Labour Government bought 18 trucking firms in the Hanson group, in a deal which landed old Bob Hanson and his partner a cool £3 million (worth about £48 million today) of the taxpayers’ money they were constantly urging governments to cut. The Hansons’ fortune was made, and the old crook who had diddled his creditors had become thoroughly ...”

“... with catholic tastes in New York City, listening to anything from the sonorous Ornette Coleman to Bob Dylan, the cloth-eared darling of the Village who failed to write a 20th-century version of ‘Le Bateau Ivre’, but managed to supply Hendrix with one of his greatest cover songs – ‘All Along the Watchtower’. Hendrix was also playing with the Isley ...”

“... of what is said is part of the effect, but only part, and is absorbed to produce something fine and true – though often something that is, quite legitimately, in two minds.’ There is something highly personal about Ricks’s preference for what might be called the more emotionally muddled poems, and there is a curious disowner in relation to many ...”

“... canny and self-interested behaviour. When we imagine a typical interwar worker, it isn’t as a bob-haired 14-year-old shop assistant wearing her first pair of heels. Contemporary commentators and officials didn’t notice such workers either: Orwell thought them irrelevant to his quest for a manly English socialism, and if J.B. Priestley was struck by the ...”

“... attack on the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action; his praise of those ‘very fine people’ among the Neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville; the Muslim travel ban; the fulminations against ‘shit-hole countries’; the gulag archipelago that his adviser Stephen Miller created for undocumented immigrants, in which children were ...”

“... open in 1941, when he was already enjoying a warm bath of celebrity. ‘Lunched Dorchester with Bob Menzies,’ he begins. ‘He was absolutely charming. Came away comfortably reassured that I had done a really good job there.’ Meetings for Coward tended to be either comforting or confrontational. The middle ground, rarely explored, was boredom. Most ...”

“... Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the end. Probably won’t do here, either. We had Bob Hope there, of course. We were lucky, we didn’t have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we ...”

“... warm October midday, so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain ...”