Search Results

“... letter requesting that Obama pardon Edward Snowden? I spoke on the phone this afternoon to the guy who wrote it. Was the FBI listening? Probably not, but at least the metadata are within reach. Things weren’t always so convenient for the bureau. Writers under Surveillance: The FBI Files (MIT, £20) collects facsimiles of ‘Bufiles’ on 16 famous ...”

“... lack the comforting apparatus of genre, the cosy familiarity of the structure in which the good guy chases the bad guy and the bad guy gets his just deserts. They are hard in other ways too: Simenon had a comfortless view of life and of human psychology, and in the romans durs that ...”

“... image of Barbra Streisand – one of the billboard signs he manufactures. Walt, a nice, normal guy, flies off to get his brother out of a jam. The disturbed Travis, however, is obstinately mute, and keeps wandering off again whenever Walt leaves him for a moment; the Henderson brothers live in different American worlds. The cosily domestic Walt, with his ...”

“... Waterfront (1954), there isn’t a moment’s doubt: forget the forlorn, would-be contender, this guy is a champion the first moment we see him, a shabby maestro, a trickster.‘I can’t convey how discomfiting it is not to be able to be a normal person,’ Brando said in 1991, testifying in the trial of his son Christian for killing Dag Drollet, the lover ...”

“... and POMO lapsed into obscurity, until a strange thing, a kind of historical rhyme, occurred. Elton John bought Watford Football Club and appointed the energetic Graham Taylor as manager. Taylor, looking for a way of fulfilling his boss’s ambition of making Watford into a First Division team, came across a statistical survey which showed that the majority of ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”

“... him – he tells the English about ‘a poem by one of your great writers, Jonathan Quick. This guy in the poem is madly in love with a woman called Celia, but he sees her commode just after she’s had a shit and he can’t take it.’ A broadcast phone call from Mrs Thatcher keeps the Russian monster on the air: ‘If one is dealing with an extremely ...”

“... came after my brother; and then the palooka, shaking the glass off. But my brother was a speedy guy, too. Another time, he somehow got into it with several greasers late one night at a restaurant-dive. He took care of a couple of them but the third one got behind him and cracked him on the noggin with a piece of crockery. I forget how he got out of that one ...”

“... remember having a lot of contact with … And she was extremely strong … like hanging out with a guy … A tough-minded, egotistical, artistic kind of guy.’ She spent months in a farmhouse with his band even though they ‘didn’t want any girl in the house, especially one who had a very deep voice’. She taught Pop ...”

“... provincial – it’s all this family business,’ Auden said later. ‘I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn’t enough to be a queer and a drunk. He had to revolt still more to break away from it all. That’s just what I’ve done by becoming an American citizen.’ Davenport-Hines’s straightforward endorsement of Auden’s view ...”

“... seen the book before. On their journey back to the city, these effects multiply. Jake mentions John Cassavetes’s film A Woman under the Influence, and Lucy subjects it to a devastating critical attack, more like a movie review than a comment. That’s because it is a movie review, or a long extract from one, written for the New Yorker in 1974 by Pauline ...”

“... Patterson was summoned to the White House before the Liston fight: ‘You’ve got to beat this guy,’ JFK told him, showing what could be gained by conforming to white rules. Liston’s behaviour simply affirmed the stereotype of the ‘bad nigger’, justifying discrimination against those who stepped out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next ...”

“... the Obscure resembles Dickensian black comedy turned absurdist, the epitaphic aspirations of a John Chivery in Little Dorrit chilled to the bone, then the receding acknowledgment of Hades-bound presences in the narrative coda of The Newcomes provides the textual obverse of Amy Dorrit’s confidence in closural inscription, which seems for her the ...”

“... pains to clear away suspicions unjustly entertained – for instance, in the cases of Basil Mann, Guy Liddell and Tomas Harris. There is a spirit of justice in Pincher, which comes out too in his treatment of Blunt, Burgess, Driberg, and a civil servant called John Cairncross. All these geese become swans in Pincher’s ...”

“... She has found powerful helpers on the far right. In her Preface she thanks the Bradley and John M. Olin Foundations for their grants. These bodies are among the most generous contributors to right-wing organisations such as the National Review, the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars. Lefkowitz sits on the advisory board of the ...”