Search Results

“... the absolute power of the Dey depended on the military support of the Janissary regiment. Charles-Robert Ageron’s Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present (1964) affords essentially the same picture. In the 1830s people said Algiers was a despotism, not because they were indulging in stereotypical thinking, but because it was a fact. One of the ...”

“... voyage to Australia in the early 19th century: that is all, apart from a letter from the Reverend Robert James Colley to his sister, purloined by Talbot and pasted into the journal. Only the title of the novel suggests anything different. ‘Rites of passage’ is a term out of 20th-century anthropology and sits oddly here, warning that Mr Golding means more ...”

“... at the Prague Jewish cemetery: “ ‘What’s left for us?” I asked. “Only time,” said Robert. “But there’s not much of it.” ’ Indiscriminate murder of civilian populations is, alas, at least as old as recorded history. What differentiates the modern German version, as has often been observed, is its implementation through industrial ...”

“... novels. A few have achieved the status of bona fide classics: W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It was the last two of those novels I kept thinking of as I read Chad Harbach’s highly ...”

“... The Also Ran The hare wasn’t there. The hare was nowhere To be seen, a sheen Of kicked-up dust, the hare’s coat, Every hair of the flank of the hare so sleek, so chic, It was sponsored, it caressed his physique. Out of sight, out of mind, the unsponsored tortoise fell Into a vertical sleep that sank him deep Down in his shell. He dreamed. He smelled the smell Of formula one ...”

“... A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and constitutional history ...”

“... The history of Cardinal Manning’s biographies is a remarkable one. When he died, on 14 January 1892, ‘no reputation ever appeared more secure,’ as Mr Gray rightly says. His death occurred on the same day as that of the Duke of Clarence, who, had he lived, would have become King of England. Normally the passing of the next heir to the throne would attract much public attention, but it was completely eclipsed by the death of the Cardinal ...”

“... with original critics of real intellectual power like Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ernst Robert Curtius, Georg Lukacs, Viktor Shklovsky and Leo Spitzer, he offers trenchant and detailed critiques of their key concepts and methods, while also conveying a sense of their achievement. Auerbach’s Mimesis is a masterwork of 20th-century criticism, but it ...”

“... Who can see the green earth any moreAs she was by the sources of Time?Who imagines her fields as they layIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?Matthew Arnold, ‘The Future’Barley field, cut, dried,Brewed, poured, you’re so garrulousLong after you’ve gone.Old English riddle from the Exeter Book                    I                        1What rutting beast snorts‘Let me give you some pointers’Then trots through the mist?                        2In the beginningWas the Word, and the Word wasParsed into creatures ...”

“... biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of ...”

“... starring as Rafe Ashton in his former wife Hilda Doolittle’s novel Bid Me to Live (1960), and as Robert Cunningham in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922), he may have had the misfortune to furnish the model for Sir Clifford Chatterley. Aldington’s maledictory novel, Death of a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic ...”

“... I heard his voice calling, ‘The sea! The sea!’ Hollowly into a shell As if he could contact Robert Louis Verne Or all the impossible, massed, forlorn spirits Edinburgh exiled, waving from twenty thousand leagues Under force eights the Lusitania, Hood, Tirpitz, Mary Rose lie barnacled, Cell-like binnacles of another life Lost to the world above but ...”

“... thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert Louis Stevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, a Scot who was one of Borges’s translators and with whom Borges stayed in St Andrews, mentions the ...”

“... the Armistice, 15,000 British, French and German airmen had died in combat. Among them was Major Robert Gregory, about whom Yeats wrote ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a poem more than half in love with the tragic joy of flight (‘I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above’). Wilbur Wright died of typhus in 1912, but ...”

“... Filming a few years back in Paris, we were visited on the set by a cardinal. Alec Guinness being absent, I took it upon myself to show him around and at the same time express my sorrow that he had missed so recent a convert to his faith. His Eminence allowed himself a rather wintry smile. ‘That,’ he observed, ‘is a conversion I understand we owe more to the cinema than the Church ...”