Search Results

“... a crude reductionist model. His antipathy towards reductionist schema finds expression, too, in a lively critique of sociobiologists, who, in his estimation, rush headlong into the zoocentric fallacy of reducing human behaviour to sets of traits ostensibly discernible in other animals but frequently projected upon them with the eventual reduction in mind. He ...”

“... feminine sympathy and tenderness he must also have resisted from his wife. ‘But I am of a more lively and affectionate temper or rather more household and daily in my affection.’ She refused to let the friendship lapse entirely, even if it meant accepting Emerson’s more limited terms: ‘The genial flow of my desire may be checked for the moment, but ...”

“... the French Revolution. Paul was their only child, extremely bright, with a shock of brown curls, lively dark eyes, fine cheekbones, a long straight nose and a very high opinion of himself. When, in 1851, the Spanish authorities crushed a rebellion on Cuba, the Lafargues sold the coffee plantation, the slaves and cooper’s workshop out of which they had ...”

“... describing the curriculum Shakespeare studied at his Stratford grammar school, Honan offers a lively and persuasive account of his lifelong negotiation with its literary influence, and instead of simply assuming that once he had become a major shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men Shakespeare had a stable, subsidised professional base for his art ...”

“... not connect Mariam/Mary’s miraculous nature with moral horror of sex).* The apple Eve offered Adam, Polizzotti amusingly points out, could have been an apricot. Or an orange or a banana. But Jerome liked the pun malus/malum (apple/evil). There’s a haunting refrain in Britten’s opera of The Turn of the Screw, which the young boy Miles sings, spooking ...”

“... assures a perpetual supply of original thoughts. He says his book was written to celebrate ‘the lively fact of technology and a system of creative destruction that can – and will – undo the blockade that the present always sets in the face of the future.’ A peculiarly American enthusiasm is detectable here on behalf of the future – as if the future ...”

“... image is everywhere. Many of the rooms contain costumed dummies which are only fractionally less lively than the identically costumed attendants, some of them startlingly like Anthony Perkins’s mother in Psycho.Then to an antique fair in the middle of some zone industrielle, every stall stocked with the appurtenances of French bourgeois life: great ...”

“... and the story is subversive because it leads us to value his deplorable outbursts as the most lively thing about him. But such dramatic eruptions of psychic magma through the surface of public discourse are relatively rare. Social interaction can be an exhausting business, as though, like the scientist Sartorius in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, we are ...”

“... Anna, was a cause of much conflict, but in the novel Eve’s daughter, Sylphid, has at least one lively scene. In The Human Stain Roth is similarly careful to give even characters he would be expected to despise a little charity parcel of empathy. Since then Roth has written mainly short books, enough of them that the Library of America edition had to ...”

“... work. He adored his children – a visitor reported that he ‘played the wildest and most lively games with them’ – and discussed politics with them when they were old enough. ‘Distinctly bourgeois in his private life’, Marx also became, over time, increasingly English in his habits and attitudes. In a thoughtful discussion of his personal ...”

“... Such attitudes, we’ve been taught to recognise, weren’t proof against the old imperial Adam, who lurks in all occidentals, and is culturally and intellectually, as well as politically and commercially, predatory. Johnson’s occasional interest in visiting India may have included some idea of making his fortune, though he mainly expressed ...”

“... poor wantons and wicked ones in this day of forbearance!’ Here, brag means ‘spirited, brisk, lively’. It is used by Auden in The Age of Anxiety: ‘How brag and crank were the birds.’ Crank means ‘brisk, jolly, lusty, spiritful, buxom’ and is used by Milton in ‘L’Allegro’: ‘Jest and youthful Jollity,/Quips and cranks, and wanton ...”

“... myself to test the impression which had been maturing in my mind, that a certain amount of regular lively travel would do me more good than any further treatment or further repose … I have now an impression amounting almost to a conviction that if I were to travel steadily for a year I would be a good part of a well man. And in case that was not enough, he ...”

“... for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s tomb at Durham, presumably mixing up George Eliot and Adam Bede.Q. Where in Oxford would you find a crucifix that had been gazed on by Pascal?A. Campion Hall. (It is a Jansenist crucifix which comes from Port Royal.)Q. What had A.E. Housman in common with the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A ...”

“... sessions with Anna Freud; but perhaps the biggest inspiration was the young German aristocrat Adam von Trott, who was a Rhodes scholar when Astor met him at Balliol in the early 1930s and formed what Lewis describes as an ‘extremely potent friendship’ with him. Von Trott enchanted everyone he met at Oxford – Isaiah Berlin was ‘completely ...”