Search Results

“... themselves to be guided, or brainwashed, by manuals of etiquette, supported by the precepts of Martin Tupper and the self-help exhortations of Samuel Smiles. One essential was to know the rules of good conversation. In their earlier years these strivers might well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr ...”

“... process he thrashes in methodological agony over what constitutes a ‘great writer’. Charles Dickens would certainly qualify – but what about Fanny Craddock and Harold Robbins? The less fastidious literary critic customarily cuts through this problem by a brutal triage. Commonest is some variant of Raymond Escarpit’s notion of separate ...”

“... the World Bank) ‘target consumers’ implicit thoughts, feelings and knowledge’ – and from Charles River Analytics, which provides expertise in ‘psychology of narratives, cultural language patterns and semantics’ for the Department of Defense. Along with technicians and scientists from Boeing, Raytheon, IBM and Lockheed ...”

“... the pressure-dependent thicks and thins of a pen-drawn line. Drypoints of night scenes by Martin Lewis exploit the uniquely dense blacks that etching can achieve. (In a number of them a dark ground was produced by first running the plate through the press with a sheet of sandpaper.) These are striking, if conventional, images that stand in a line you ...”

“... funfair – make it tempting to draw comparisons with the English kitsch of photographers such as Martin Parr. However, the Rio group’s photographs engage with their subjects, who aren’t documented but rather are in dialogue with the camera, active participants in the cultural and political life around them. As Alan Denney (who helped to catalogue the ...”

“... Normal​ accident theory, developed by the sociologist Charles Perrow in the 1980s, predicts that sooner or later there will be a devastating accident with a nuclear weapon. The list of near misses is terrifying. In Command and Control (2013), Eric Schlosser compiled a minute by minute account of an accident involving a Titan II nuclear missile based at Damascus, Arkansas in September 1980 ...”

“... than others. Edel, for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling. In addition to being one of the most lopsided lives ever written – 23 chapters on the first forty years, only two chapters on the last thirty – this is also one of the most incorrigible in its ...”

“... of Los Angeles, for example, was termed a “manifesto” in quite respectable circles.’ Charles Silberman, an editor of Fortune, recommended, in his influential Crisis in Black and White, the Saul Alinsky technique of ‘rubbing raw the sores of discontent’. Change would almost certainly be accompanied by violence, Silberman wrote. Nor was it ...”

“... air above it seems briefly to stand for the task they are performing. But what is that something? Martin Sorrell, whose translations are often less free than Mason’s, and never less impressive, takes a bolder turn: Madame holds herself too stiff in the next field where sons of toil flurry like snow; clutching parasol; trampling umbels; too proud for ...”

“... the view of posterity. The most extraordinary of these acts of intellectual banditry remains Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, of 1830-1833, where Lyell argues that geology starts with himself. So, an Enlightenment which believed in materialism and progress, but which was a scientific non-event. Strange. The great merit of The Ferment of Knowledge ...”

“... of relationship, however, exists between newspapers and the national Establishment. On this point Martin Walker quotes approvingly the views of Wilbur Schramm: ‘Prestige papers are shaped, to an important degree, by what the leadership in the country wants to know and wants known. The leadership in the country is also shaped, to an important degree, by what ...”

“... on how we write and think about the ancient world. The best-known version of this approach is Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, his sometimes brilliant, more often wilfully obtuse, exploration of the various forms of racism embedded within classics as a discipline. In Compromising Traditions (a collection of essays deriving from major – now notorious ...”

“... ironically, starting with the jackalopes and the women who love them.And who, precisely, is Agnes Martin? Her semi-obscurity is exactly the point. True, her paintings now reside in all the fabled modern collections and sell for millions of dollars. True, like O’Keeffe she lived near Taos and Santa Fe for much of her life. But she remains a cult figure ...”

“... with the events of the late 1960s: racism, riots, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Russian troop movements, the liberalisation of communism in Czechoslovakia. Where she comes from informs what she sees. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder, she makes a list of ‘Attempted and successful assassinations since the ...”

“... culture, as well as religion, to the slums. The distinctive Art Nouveau structure was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, and is dominated by a squat, Romanesque arch, placed, rather eccentrically, off-centre to make way for a modest door that used to lead to the upper galleries. It is clad in glazed terracotta bricks, and the roofline is capped by two ...”