Search Results

“... are the ones who tell fairy tales, why do fairy tales paint such ugly pictures of women? Or, as Marina Warner puts it, ‘If and when women are narrating, why are the female characters so cruel? ... Why have women continued to speak at all within this body of story which defames them so profoundly?’ Or again, what sort of woman would tell that sort ...”

“... novels, with an amplitude which cannot dispense with the realistic description of everyday events. Marina Warner is best at it. The art of close shaving, for instance, can never have been more vividly and minutely set down than in her narrator’s depiction of her grandfather (whom the narrator has never seen) handling a cut-throat razor. David Lodge’s ...”

“... Service, certainly easier to achieve than was Bevan’s task, will be without electoral cost. Marina Warner’s pamphlet is about the sad state of many children under our present government. It is a pleasant change from Honigsbaum, for she sees it as part of the author’s job to be readable. The work is an elegant and moving description of the life ...”

“... Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock is an impossible book. It circles around monsters and the frightening of children, but it also has chapters on the heavenly host, bananas and birdsong. Its material includes nursery tales, Greek myth, Shakespeare and Keats, autobiography, film and pop culture ...”

“... for the reading of The Arabian Nights, there can be no once and for all signings off either. As Marina Warner observes in her effulgent new study of the lives and afterlives of the tales, even the forms of their inexhaustibility are plural. First, despite the promise of a precise count held out in their title (or one of them at least), you can never be ...”

“... of French patriotism. Personified France and canonised Joan are both enigmatic figures. With Joan, Marina Warner has succeeded as well as anyone could in plucking out the heart of her mystery. She is the heroine of this book: deservedly, for it is hard to think of any close parallel to her anywhere in history, even though in other times and climes, and ...”

“... direct that the novel of gossip can seem, by comparison, over-fleshed. In her introductory essay, Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre ...”

“... likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner’s magisterial works of cultural history is somewhat similar: the cool temperature, the graceful touch, the sensation of resistance being gently annihilated under an accumulation of brilliant particularity.* Resistance, if you have any, is ...”

“... so some venerable commentators – the late Lawrence Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or ...”

“... is exactly analogous to that faced by feminists, and in the section on ‘The Body Politic’ Marina Warner, Hermione Lee and Sandra Gilbert explore the ways in which women might or do speak and write so as to convey their experience in a way that communicates a female point of view without being disenfranchising. ...”

“... is the vogue-word: but this seems to me a farrago of fantasy-triggers. I was astonished when Marina Warner asserted on television that the book ‘gives you an astonishing understanding of a political situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ...”

“... ways artists have found to approach, but perhaps never really achieve, complete invisibility. As Marina Warner wrote in the 5 July issue of the LRB, while reviewing Damien Hirst along the river at Tate Modern, the Hayward’s is an exhibition that courts attention above all else: attention to surfaces and atmospheres as much as, maybe more than, the ...”

“... corners. Even the essays in the exhibition catalogue (Hayward, £22.99) are collections of a kind: Marina Warner and Brian Dillon, the show’s curator, have both written magpie pieces that list facts about collecting and find disparate ways of talking about the idea of curiosity. Part of the pleasure of the cabinet of curiosities is, of course, that ...”

“... to refer to Jonas as a sort of shaman – a label she firmly refused in a public conversation with Marina Warner in June. The largest installation in the show, Lines in the Sand (2002), seems to ask too much of this absent guiding presence. The individual elements are compelling: photographs her grandmother took in Egypt in 1910, H.D.’s epic poem Helen ...”

“... Greer puts it, ‘by a gang of madwomen in flapping black habits’, have kept their faith. For Marina Warner, her Ascot convent is ‘like a beloved authority figure of your youth that you cannot face’, or perhaps a first husband. Marcella Evaristi would like to have her children baptised as lapsed Catholics. But the testimony remains constant until ...”