Search Results

“... And there’s another financial pressure, perhaps the biggest of all. In 1966 the US economist William Baumol noted a divergence in modern rich-world economies between industries in which people could easily be replaced by technology, such as manufacturing, and industries fundamentally reliant on people, like healthcare and education and, the subject of ...”

“... Richler prints a vivid – and typically too-brief – extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its ...”

“... a Harvard professor and Unitarian minister, his mother came from a distinguished Boston family. William James introduced the pair and became one of Edward Estlin’s godfathers. As well as the grand house at 104 Irving Street where he was born, Cummings’s family had a summer house in New Hampshire, which he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there ...”

“... who don’t need to live something in order to write it, who use their ‘imaginations’. William Vollmann, with whom Zambreno professes a sympathy, intentionally puts himself in extreme situations, then writes about them. David Foster Wallace (to whom Zambreno doesn’t relate) in his fiction seemingly did not. So when Keeler, offended by ...”

“... and photos and provides a good potted history of the game, from the moment in 1823 when William Webb Ellis, a boy at Rugby School, caught a football and ran with it, right up to the present. (Those who enjoy watching the modern game imagine Webb Ellis as a boy-prophet, running towards them with an egg hatching in his hands.) His legendary act is ...”

“... text. In no particular order, and often for no very good reason, Wittgenstein, Auster, Nabokov, Barnes, McEwan, Spinoza, Amis, Aristotle, Zeno, Shakespeare, Pasternak, Banville, Dostoevsky, Frost, Cervantes, Updike, Beckett, Chekhov (and others) make guest appearances with paraphrased words of wisdom, or just words. Erdal does not wear her reading ...”

“... points out that in his version of Calvino’s short story collection Cosmicomics, William Weaver translates tagliatelle as ‘noodles’, which would hardly be felt necessary today). Julian Barnes, in a tough and very thorough review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, summed up the issue: ‘If you ...”

“... was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an ...”

“... the circle of those entitled to be known as ‘moral managers’ to encompass a much larger group: William Battie, Thomas Arnold, William Perfect, Joseph Mason Cox, Francis Willis, Benjamin Faulkner, William Pargeter, Thomas Bakewell, ...”

“... most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the enrichment of their work by introducing people from history ...”

“... the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently meaning it would attract some musician she fancied, but clearly it didn’t. And ...”

“... magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy Compton-Burnett, the gallery owner Betty Parsons – even the kooky, spooky, more-than-a-little-ropey Patricia Highsmith, a gothic late-life ...”

“... Thus English historians saw little to question in the plundering raids of Henry V or even of William the Conqueror. French historians saw little to question in the Empire of Napoleon. The jus ad bellum has proved a will o’ the wisp, though still actively pursued by some. The lesser attempt to moderate or even to civilise war has been more ...”

“... his ‘special writers’, just so as they’d have somewhere to spread their elbows in New York. William Faulkner was never out of there. Always at night. Always drunk. But one morning even Cerf got fed up with the brewery toxins in the office hum. He took back the key. Another of Cerf’s specials, Truman Capote, a young goldfish new-swimming into the ...”