Search Results

“... means that if you scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost alone among its ...”

“... where they hoped to engage the waiting Japanese. Mistaking a group of Hull trawlers for enemy craft they opened fire, a mere 18,000 miles off target. Leaving two dead fishermen and an unseemly diplomatic incident in its wake, the fleet loped on down to Spain and Africa, into the Indian Ocean and finally the Pacific, where military annihilation swiftly ...”

“... the main author of Trump’s 2018 National Defence Strategy; the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who describes China as part of an ‘axis of anti-American autocracies’; and Robert Lighthizer, the leading Republican trade warrior who speaks of China as a totalitarian state – will return to ...”

“... Bovary, Michel Leiris) rivals her reputation as an author – should have produced 1100 pages of craft talk? Or is the capacity for craft talk a symptom of scruples functioning as creative constraint? ‘This was the sort of question I typically spent some time worrying over: Do you ease a scruple? Or do you calm a ...”

“... very strong as a man who understands these matters. In a comprehensive attack on the reputation of Robert Lowell, in 1973, he wrote as follows: ‘Endless, aimless consecutive sentences. The words do not coalesce into a good substance. They are difficult to say and knobbly to hear, their awkwardnesses are unconvincing, unjustifiable, they do not measure or ...”

“... overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri of the artworld.’ Simpson doesn’t conform to any of these templates. He is an apostate to all current ...”

“... which was radical in 1965, is uncontroversial today and we now know that it was even held by Robert McNamara at the very time he was ordering the carpet-bombing of Vietnam. Now here’s the interesting thing. Gingrich opposed the war and took a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and ...”

“... mock pomposity in Joseph Andrews. In a work published just days after the fall from office of Sir Robert Walpole – ‘prime minister’ in a sense that had no constitutional legitimacy at the time, and implied an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was a standard target, but Fielding’s ...”

“... Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a hegemonic project like Modernism is getting under way. Frost’s reputation survived because, feigning simplicity, he appealed to the people, to ...”

“... up in the ‘new unionism’ that energised British socialism at the end of the 1880s, as the old craft unions made way for organisations that were more militant and more inclusive, willing to accept unskilled workers and women. New unionism’s openness to women meant that Born and Daniell could get involved in organising strikes and recruiting members. The ...”

“... it coloured their thinking about morality and psychology, to say nothing of their actual craft, is far from clear. The physiognomic origins and structure of the composite portrait are illustrated only by examples, insufficient to clinch the case, from Le Rouge et le Noir, Villette, Tieck’s Vittoria Accorombona, Fromentin’s Dominique and ...”

“... political and social context to focus on the immediate conditions that governed Shakespeare’s craft – those created by the professional company he kept. Even if Shakespeare wasn’t a great company keeper in the Falstaffian sense, company of several kinds shaped his way of writing: the company of non-dramatic poets with whom he competed in his early ...”

“... them as a robust prediction of relativity. Among the most important clarifications came from J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was teaching theoretical physics at Berkeley in the 1930s when he and a graduate student, Hartland Snyder, worked out what would happen to a star after it exhausted its nuclear fuel. With no more outward-directed pressure coming from ...”

“... Cambridge, he takes pains to show how religious controversy and pedagogical needs, quarrels over craft organisation and innovations in technology interacted in that uniquely contested and productive place, the printer’s shop. The book is studded with details of authors’ lives and publishers’ practices – with a wealth of precise and striking ...”

“... Again, translation was the only mode of access. From the time of Browning and Swinburne to that of Robert Lowell, Anglo-American poetry has, under a modernistic veneer, been anxiously conservative. It has assembled the treasures of the past and mimed them with passionate nostalgia before closing time. Hence the primal dramatic function of allusion and ...”