Search Results

“... him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for saying that they were ashamed of George W. Bush’s Texas connections, though she later apologised for the remark – bringing some relative youth to the proceedings. The ...”

“... pompous, but I recognised Brooke’s talent at once, and remarked that the epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne – ‘Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and Some Falsehoods almost Truths’ – contains ‘in a sense justification of all novel-writing’. I knew nothing of Jocelyn Brooke himself, except what was to be gathered from this book. He was, in ...”

“... noted that John Denham’s topographical poem Cooper’s Hill (1642) was printed on ‘a sort of browne paper’ because the depleted printers ‘could gett no better’. Fascinated with Roman remains, Aubrey took Charles II to see Avebury in 1663 after discovering the stones while hunting with aristocratic friends; he commissioned drawings of the ...”

“... career in the way they once would have done.Confronted by philistinism on the scale of the Browne Report and the government’s White Paper, what are we to do? Where can we turn? Not to the present government, for it is committed to the notion of the university system as a market, driven by economic considerations. And not to the Labour ...”

“... 1685, deserve to rank among the classical pages in English prose. There is nothing in Donne or Thomas Browne more simply affecting or more eloquent than these Kindertotenlieder: ‘After this I caused the body to be Cofin’d in Lead, and reposited him that night, about 8 a clock in the Church of Deptford ... intending (God willing) to have him ...”

“... and writers. His novel reverberates with a grave religious wit, not unlike that of Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote that ‘the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying,’ and very close to the 17th-century divine Jeremy Taylor, who tells us in Holy Living that balding is merely man’s early preparation for death. Svevo would have loved ...”

“... torrent of copy. He worked in conditions of creative chaos. Visiting him in his lodgings in 1823, Thomas Hood found him ‘quite at home in the midst of a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs – billows of books, tossing, tumbling, surging open’. His friend Matthew Hill recalled De Quincey turning up for ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton and Thomas Fuller and Tristram Shandy on its sleeve. At other times it has a tart poeticism: ‘He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.’ Or exhibits that proto-Dickensian habit of comic ...”

“... truth and justice in their own case, to find the trail silently erased by the thin blue line? Sir Thomas Browne wrote of the hazard of fame in Urne Buriall: ‘but the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy.’ It is the oblivion of iniquity that defines our contemporary predicament. Milan Kundera is one of those writers from Eastern Europe ...”

“... even Hemingway’s white-boned prose acquired loose flaps. Two years later, still stricken with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”

“... after years of manuscript circulation, the name of his bête noire, the poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell, was dashed after the first digraph, as in ‘loads of Sh— almost choakt the way’. It would have been a feeble attempt at disguise, but disguise wasn’t the point. In a satire alert to the recycling of bad poems as wastepaper for baking cakes ...”

“... in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a radically new approach to the history of medicine. Now there are bodily histories of the emotions, of sexuality and gender, of political philosophy (‘the body ...”

“... But while Byron was disowned by the Victorians, embarrassed that this ‘huge sulky dandy’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, should have received so much adoration and respect, Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War. Her importance in dictating the taste for patriotism, obedience and sacrifice in ...”