Search Results

“... over the airwaves. It’s hard to decipher at first but is gradually revealed to be a recording of John Denver singing ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’. This is someone’s idea of a joke. Ridley Scott’s certainly, but also that of someone within the story. The song would have been 133 years old in 2104, so its appearance is proof either of classic status ...”

“... increasingly suspect. Irascible and whining, was he? Well, wouldn’t you whine a little with this guy on your case? Before we dismiss Fassbinder as a career grump, I think we need to know something: what was he like when this jerk wasn’t there? Love is colder than death is a classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the ...”

“... said he was the greatest president for Blacks since Lincoln.Don has always been a Las Vegas kinda guy, with his showgirls and gold-plated toilets, a long-running joke in New York high society, and his rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack’s favourite comedian, another Don – Rickles, the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little ...”

“... He lost 49-47. Romney lost the state he governed, Massachusetts, 61-38 to Obama. He’s a ‘car guy’, not one to take the train, and it would be hard for a Mormon to hawk erection pills with a straight face. But Romney turned 65 in March and can now supplement his fortune with Social Security benefits. At a breakfast after the election he choked up and ...”

“... so he acquaints himself with this ‘testicular view’. One story in particular strikes him: John Cheever’s ‘The Country Husband’. The force of it disorients him, he realises, because in twenty sad, brilliant pages it demolishes the allure of the things for which he most longs: ‘husbandhood and fatherhood and a certain kind of woman who attached ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... and thinks for an awful moment it is her lover who has been killed – their names both being John. A moment’s reflection will show the utter absurdity of this, in terms of ordinary human emotion, but it is an effective and traditional dramatic stroke, dovetailed into a modern setting in such a way that it seems to reveal the ‘truth’ about modern ...”

“... Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s ...”

“... in the race for Labour’s deputy leadership against the candidate supported by the Tribune Group, John Prescott? Right again. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by ...”

“... not take the subject too seriously either, which is a relief after the hagiographical approach of Guy de Mallac and others, worthy as their pioneering studies have been. But Christopher Barnes’s ‘Literary Biography’, of which this solid work is the first of two volumes, will certainly become the standard and indispensable guide for students not only of ...”

“... Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great personal charm, unable to register the paucity of content, limited range and shallowness of his work? The short ...”

“... than effective as a demagogue. We know this person from high school or college, the privileged guy who seemed easy to get along with because he already had it made. Although some resent the type, others identify with it – extravagantly. Many on the Left argue that there are no real differences between Bush and Gore. Both are dynastic politicians, party ...”

“... have a shot. E: What? We don’t have a shot? Ari: No. You wonder why? They’re out to a guy … I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, his name is Tom Cruise. E: Tom Cruise is going to play Pablo Escobar? Come on, the guy’s not even Hispanic. Ari: Yeah, and Hilary Swank has a vagina and she won an ...”

“... gibberish. They took a text that my mother had written – my mother! About me being a child. This guy spent an hour deconstructing my mother’s writing. Something’s going wrong here. Something’s going wrong. This guy tied these totally different things together. The absurdity of it.AS: But you like surprising ...”

“... He describes these droll insigniae in a typically deadpan passage in his autobiography: One guy did one of Pan. Pan played his little horn and all the women followed him. He’d take them into a cave and ball them, and then the women would disappear. They’d never find them again. I had Pan put on my left forearm, and then – I’ve always liked ...”