Search Results

“... underpinnings of their science. Controversy arose in the 1830s, when the radical anatomist Robert Grant dissented, claiming instead that the fossils were reptilian. What was at stake was transmutation, which in the version subscribed to by Grant required a gradual ascent of organic forms in a single continuous series; the appearance of an anachronistic ...”

“... on the muzak and the mailing of America. It is no small relief, therefore, to be reminded by Robert Middlekauf, a leading historian of the American Enlightenment, that Franklin was in fact a complicated and charming man with the will heartily to dislike any number of people who stood in his way. People like William Penn, for example, the absentee ...”

“... last twenty years. They are still turning up: this volume contains letters, formerly unknown, to Robert Mountsier, who later became Lawrence’s agent in the US, and a batch to Douglas Goldring. The volume covers an interesting period. The Lawrences were having a bad time in Cornwall up to October 1917, when they were expelled by the police. Then they ...”

“... Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack Benny. They were in court less because of Hauptmann than because of Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity of them all. It is a sign of the passing of time that on the dustjacket of this book the name of ...”

“... of his imaginative life and the drudgery which gave him his living. This, then, is the theme of Robert Essick’s book: the centrality of printmaking to the understanding of Blake’s composite art, and the interdependence of his commercial and imaginative life. It is one of the most penetrating and informative books to have appeared on Blake in recent ...”

“... through the diseased consciousness of our selves as beings awash in limitless oceans of time. Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress is a bewilderingly awful book. But it certainly does offer us a distorting mirror of a kind. Nisbet is a conservative American sociologist of some prominence (the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emeritus ...”

“... of the British Empire against three major powers in three different theatres of war.’ Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had put the same point more succinctly three years earlier: ‘We are greatly overlanded.’ We now have ample evidence that, in the 1930s, ministers and their service advisers were more and more ...”

“... which pays is the kind which submits itself entirely to the poetic process. The Selected Poems of Robert Wells also give the impression of having been carefully worked over, but he is not plagued with quirkiness or ingenuity, as Cassity seems often to be. In his poems the sensible world matters for its own sake rather than for the sake of any notions that can ...”

“... Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on ...”

“... of thought and art that has gone into it. An Ancient Castle is a children’s story written by Robert Graves in the early Thirties and only recently discovered among a collection of his manuscripts. It, too, brings an air from earlier days, those that followed the First War, with their memories of old-fashioned virtues, now threatened by chicanery and ...”

“... and wealthy non-nobles, who were able to buy their way into a nobility which conferred privilege. Robert Forster showed us how astute and businesslike the nobility of Toulouse and Burgundy were in the running of their estates. Chaussinand-Nogaret revealed the closeness of the ties between the world of high financiers, who easily married their daughters into ...”

“... have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied. So one must travel to California to read, for example, Amis’s several unpublished novels: the ...”

“... editor in the early 1960s. It must have seemed strange to read the poetry of Pound, Williams, Robert Duncan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robert Creeley and Louis Zukofsky in a right-wing political journal. ‘Don’t worry about the Birch boys,’ Kenner wrote to Davenport in 1961, trying to persuade him to contribute to the ...”

“... was the political order made by and for the war’s losers, the vanquished who are the subject of Robert Gerwarth’s fine book. ‘The very situations that bring about a modern war are destroyed in its wake,’ Raymond Aron wrote. ‘It is the battle in and for itself, and not the origin of the conflict or the peace treaty that constitutes the major fact and ...”

“... forgiven for that. Karl was much given to leaving – ‘more of a born leaver’, he said of Robert Lowell, whose wife had made the mistake of calling him ‘a born joiner’. He started at the Treasury, had a short stint in television; became literary editor first of the Spectator, then the Statesman; joined the Listener as editor in 1967 and the ...”