Search Results

“... generation? Hard to say. ‘No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame,’ as Auden wrote about the case of A.E. Housman. But Cambridge, however unexpectedly, was quite a lot to blame for the phenomenon of A.A. Milne and Pooh Bear, when they were very young. The atmosphere of enlightened upper-middle-class fun and games, in a new world where to be young was ...”

“... robust and lunatic. The writer believes that there are true words and false. His is an extreme case of what Anne Barton calls cratylism. The word comes from Plato’s dialogue, the Cratylus, which is all about the question of whether language is naturally rooted in reality or is merely arbitrary. Within the dialogue the character called Cratylus maintains ...”

“... Chiesa the practice of exorcism and suspending him from his functions as parish priest. The case was closed; from this point on Chiesa entirely disappears from the records. No one is going to buy the movie rights. After a brief flourish in the opening chapter, Levi himself gives up the idea that he has much of a story to tell. But he does have material ...”

“... of symbolism in Medieval literature is refreshing. Nevertheless, the book’s tone (very C.S. Lewis) does now seem rather old-fashioned and bellelettrist and one’s understanding of Chrétien de Troyes is not increased by the parallels that Vinaver draws between him and John Steinbeck; nor does the long section on Flaubert serve to throw much light on ...”

“... warmth and talk and joyous spirit, its cultural zest and variously lovely landscapes which C.S. Lewis and other writers in Craig’s anthology so tenderly celebrate – for all the abounding glittering jet, as Yeats would never say, of this region – there is another side to the lived experience of the place which cries out for embodiment. And with a deft ...”

“... anxiety. These are works characterised above all by a spirit of hatred which, according to C.S. Lewis in his Reflections on the Psalms (1961), ‘strikes us in the face … like the heat from a furnace mouth’. Psalm 1 in the Authorised Version warns that ‘the way of the ungodly shall perish,’ and from then on fury and malediction alternate with ...”

“... At the age of 86 and with a broken hip, the Marchesa Casa-Maury was interviewed by Caroline Blackwood for her book about the last dreadful days – months, years rather – of the Duchess of Windsor. The Marchesa had been the Duke’s mistress for fifteen years when Wallis Simpson arrived on the scene. Blackwood explained to the old lady how the Duchess was being sequestered in Paris by her lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, who was obsessed with her, and that she was officiously being kept alive, although rumoured to be comatose, to have turned black and to have shrivelled to the size of a doll ...”

“... no breakfast, nothing but ‘monishing and stripes’. Or as an Irish classmate said sadly to C.S. Lewis at Campbell College more than four centuries later: ‘This time last month, I wouldn’t have been going in to Preparation, I’d have a wee tea-cloth laid for me at one end of the table and sausages to my ...”

“... to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an Oxford don ...”

“... importance to him. Some, such as his Highgate schoolmaster T.S. Eliot and his Oxford nemesis C.S. Lewis, had been in post since his youth, but new figures continually joined them. One was Nikolaus Pevsner, who by some quirk of mandarin humour was knighted the same year as Betjeman. Hillier struggles, unconvincingly, to find the roots of Betjeman’s ...”

“... among the New Lines poets, but nevertheless felt some sympathy with them, he makes a fair case. Whether he’s right to maintain that the Movement was as central to the Fifties as the ‘Auden Group’ to the Thirties depends a bit on whether you believe, as he does, that there was a ‘Movement ideology’ existing in some significant relation to the ...”

“... story so far) its present state of bewilderment. Both novels have had framing themes: in the one case, Elizabethan drama, and in the other Van Gogh. She has had much to say about, respectively, virginity and the implications of nature morte, whether through her plot or at one discursive remove from it. But though the characters’ lives are cultured, and ...”

“... by a series of genuinely powerful arguments, to scorn. Some may be surprised to learn that C.S. Lewis, of all people, put the case against Vives with especial effectiveness. The essentialists would have us believe, he wrote, that if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from ...”

“... become a habit of criticism’), but Platt is star-struck (‘Stephen Greenblatt and his work have cast a benign shadow over this project’). Shorn of its framework of high Post-Structuralist theory, as it is in both of these accessibly written books (and more signally in Greenblatt’s own prefatory materials to the new Norton Shakespeare), New Historicism ...”

“... again what is striking is not the new achievement but the new self-admiring rhetoric. Is it the case, he asks, that there is a general belief in the obvious (traditional, authoritarian) single meaning of a text, a belief which must therefore be demystified and deconstructed? No, few hold such an opinion; what is being demystified anew is merely the old ...”