Search Results

“... Atlantic City. It is a forlorn edifice with damp walls and a cracked facade. Carl ‘The Truth’ Williams, who fought Mike Tyson in July, is a regular visitor to the boxing gym on the upper floor, where the athletic young men – mostly black and Hispanic – spar in a raised ring, thrash oblong leather bags, pump metal, skip rope, and stalk their own images ...”

“... As he looks forward to his 70th birthday Sir Michael Howard can also look back over a distinguished career which began with Wellington, Christ Church and the Coldstream Guards. In 1943, as Lieutenant Howard, fresh from the University, he led his platoon in a dangerous uphill charge against a German position north of Salerno ...”

“... Science returns to its roots in religion, unashamedly. When Isherwood drinks with Tennessee Williams, they talk sex all night. Sex in California is peaceful and strange:     And now a man appeared, walking along the tide line. As soon as he saw the trunks around my neck, he began to grin, with pleased amusement. He stripped off his own trunks and ...”

“... like and none of it needs to make any sense so long as it makes someone feel better. As Robbie Williams sang in his glucosic smash-hit rock ballad ‘Angels’, ‘through it all, she offers me protection, a lot of love and affection, whether I’m right or wrong.’ But if you’re going to believe in angels, it seems to me (young fogey that I am), it ...”

“... check.American poets have never tired of the wonders of refrigeration. Ever since William Carlos Williams pilfered plums from the icebox there have been songs in praise of fridges and their contents – and why shouldn’t there be? Ruefle’s poems make the most of such wonders. In ‘Love Story’ from The Book (Wave, £21), her new collection of prose ...”

“... a story of loneliness, the ultimately futile craving for lasting human connection, illustrated by Michael, a married Everyman who experiences other people as distressingly undifferentiated. He seems to find love – or the rare opportunity to experience not just physical passion but reciprocal compassion – for a night with a special (anomalous) puppet ...”

“... Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a sort of Finneganese, and long thought to have been the work of Joyce himself, or ‘Germ’s Choice’, as the writer calls him. It turns out that the apparently invented Vladimir Dixon ...”

“... The peaceable whale is the least cute and most awesome of our fellow animals, and Heathcote Williams rises to his subject with a volume which is not only a picture-book of the whale, and an anthology of human observations of the creature and its meaning for us, but is held together by his long poem which lists, in a Whitmanesque way, the utterly ...”

“... of each other and some seem to differ little from political polemics, but with Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, Roger Ruston and Bernard Williams among the contributors there is much that is worth considering. All four of these philosophers reject the notion that it is meaningful to have the bomb without having the ...”

“... seem easy. So why a slave novel now? I can only think of something the Jewish American writer Michael Chabon once said about his own writing: I felt I could bring it all together, that it would be OK. I could do whatever I wanted to do … and it would be OK even if it verged on crime fiction, even if it verged on magic realism, even if it verged on ...”

“... marriage of Ireland and America, of Paisley and Presley, come from? Was he reading William Carlos Williams, or were the influences all vernacular, as he, the vernacular anthologist, might have us believe? Whichever, it was an unforgettable performance. Epochal books like that, invigorating and new, are a hard act to follow. A quick successor might only have ...”

“... is possessed of an unfiltered enthusiasm and spontaneity. One significant early mentor was Lindley Williams Hubbell, a fascinating, little-known American poet and early champion of Gertrude Stein who moved to Japan in the 1950s. Another Kyoto-based American expatriate poet and translator who steered him towards translation was Edith Marcombe Shiffert, who ...”

“... apparatus of future editions of the book. Achak and Eggers met in January 2003, introduced by Mary Williams, who ran the Lost Boys Foundation in Atlanta, a charity dedicated to helping Sudanese refugees in the United States. Achak wanted to tell his story – his early life in Marial Bai; his long walk across and out of Sudan; his years spent in refugee camps ...”

“... getting more exasperated with each other as the decades went by. Later in his book he uses Bernard Williams as a contemporary foil for Dewey, and this is an excellent choice. Dewey enjoyed debunking what he called ‘the alleged discipline of epistemology’ and ‘the epistemology industry’: he was convinced that the whole tradition of ...”

“... worth pondering. Shadbold’s roulette and James’s chapter of accidents become poker in Gordon Williams’s lively novel Pomeroy. Up there in Dawson City, One-Eye Riley the mad gambler was asked: ‘Is it true you regard poker as a matter of life or death?’ He replied: ‘Hell, no, cards is serious.’ John Stockley Pomeroy is a West Point graduate ...”