Search Results

“... it. From the really nice people he graduated to the ‘lurid and fashionable’, as Augustus John described the artistic set in Twenties Paris. It was the world of the Train Bleu, of Diaghilev, Cocteau, opium and neurosis; a brittle atmosphere vulnerable to clumsy intrusions. Wood had to flee in embarrassment when his uncle and aunt turned up on a ...”

“... or Frankly. If anything of Hemingway survives into this phase of Ford’s writing it is what John Cheever (himself an influence) claimed you could sniff in all of Hemingway’s work: the smell of loneliness. Ford had always been a writer with a message, in the sense that there was always a mood, a resolution, his fiction was drawn towards; he wanted to ...”

“... was impishly rhetorical. Germans were commonly assumed to be sexual perverts, like the villain of John Buchan’s Greenmantle, the ‘huge, brutal’ Ulrich von Stumm with his ‘perverted taste for soft delicate things’. ‘Do you speak German?’ was among the most familiar graffiti in the public conveniences of Paris. Signs of Teutonic deviation at home ...”

“... more recent Erics – Ambler, Sykes, Shipton, Heffer – oozed shame when signing their names. John Betjeman, in Summoned by Bells, agonises over Farrar’s ‘mawkish’ and ‘oh-so-melodious’ book through which runs a schoolboy sense of impending ‘Doom! Shivering Doom!’ The doom which Betjeman and his contemporaries at Marlborough dreaded was no ...”

“... by what might be called ‘the effects of Surrealism’. Especially striking is her portrait of Christian (‘Bébé’) Bérard as a jovial latter-day John the Baptist, his head neatly suspended at the edge of a round pool as though on a tray. There are also distinctive fashion photographs, like the one of a model in a ...”

“... only evolutionary mechanism. Yet the EES remains contentious. The announcement this year that the John Templeton Foundation, a Christian funding agency, has awarded an $8 million grant to a multinational team of researchers, led by the evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, to work on the EES has caused a rumble of dissent ...”

“... gallant men, and I thought them fools.’ What, I wonder, did these ‘fools’ think of John Milton as he watched and judged and yet abstained from their pleasures? Towards the end of his Latin poem on the death of his university friend Carlo Diodati, Milton expresses the fear that he might sound ‘turgidulus’. He then launches into a description ...”

“... travels in America in 1831, the other a picaresque romance about an Englishman called John Larrit (known as Parrot for his talent as a mimic) who is suddenly and brutally torn from an idyllic childhood as the son of an itinerant printer in late 18th-century Devon and transported to Australia, where he grows up to become a topographical artist and ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... hugely important to him, however, and when the family moved to Dublin in 1905 he attended the Christian Brothers’ ‘O’Connell School’, the nursery of several other revolutionaries. His brothers joined the British Army, his parents remained opposed to Sinn Fein, and at the time of the Easter Rising O’Malley himself was enrolled (on a prestigious ...”

“... come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other. Understandably so, since defining this entity in its own terms ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... For Serbs, they begin in Kosovo or in Bosnia where Serbia is trying to defend civilised Christian Europe against the encroachments of this Other. For the Croats, the Balkans begin in Orthodox, despotic and Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia safeguards Western democratic values. For many Italians and Austrians, they begin in Slovenia, the ...”

“... bishop Behaine, ‘a single-minded, devoted, hard-working, early imperialist’, dreaming of a Christian empire in the Far East. Up-to-date forts and arsenals were constructed under French direction, war ships and cannon supplied. It must have been the first decisive impact of fire-power on warfare in Indochina, in 1802, the Nguyen dynasty returned to the ...”