Search Results

“... with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their stars, no longer occupy the same place in our imaginations. ‘Remember River ...”

“... Kozo Hirani, a substantial, balding man in a brown pinstripe suit, was on the upper floor of a warren of small-scale temporary buildings that now house the town’s administration. To reach him I had flown to Tokyo, taken a train more than three hundred miles north to Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture, then got into a van with seven people from ...”

“... dread, how about it?’) At the moment, literary Stockholm is abuzz over a stunt pulled by a young poet, whose acclaimed new book has just turned out to be entirely plagiarised from translations of American poets called Robert – Creeley, Mezey, Bly, Lowell, Penn Warren etc. The perpetrator had sent a copy of the book ...”

“... that he had the same problem with Frieda and had come nearest to ‘perfect love’ with a young coalminer when he was about sixteen. Both in the novel and in real life, Lawrence’s doctrine at this time was that perfect sexual harmony could not be found in marriage, so that the husband needed the ‘new adjustment’ of passionate love for a male ...”

“... are gorgeous pictures: Truman Capote dancing with Tuesday Weld at Dunne’s black and white ball; Warren Beatty, scrawny, bespectacled, hunched over a piano; Tony Curtis and Belden Katleman (a Las Vegas gentleman) at a wedding, looking like Corleones. There are also fearsome glimpses of melodrama, or worse – a quarrel springing up among Gig ...”

“... adjacent to ‘Vaselino’ is ‘dandy’, which Valentino played to the hilt. In The Young Rajah, as in other roles, he ‘dons jangling bracelets on his wrists and forearms and a ring for every finger. Bare-chested, he’s covered with brown body paint and draped with ropes of twined pearls.’ Natacha thought that Rudy ‘looked best ...”

“... DeLillo recognises that this was in no small part because of the effect on his novel of the Warren Committee report on the Kennedy assassination. He read all of the 26-volume, multi-million-word report, which, as he says, ‘provided an extraordinary window on life in the Fifties and Sixties and, beyond that, gave me a sense of people’s speech ...”

“... associated, interchangeable motifs. The stories themselves are of no great importance except for young Skidmore, whose world is steadily depopulated as the year goes by. The reader’s pleasures are other and various. One of them is the intertextual chase. Here, for instance, Stead simultaneously parodies Robbe-Grillet’s degree-zero text and, by putting ...”

“... historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the restless ...”

“... in 2012 the GOP concluded that it must increase its appeal to ethnic minorities, women and the young, otherwise it would find itself marginalised. This was widely agreed. But what happened was the opposite: it ended up with a candidate who was anathema to all those groups. Why? Because the people who voted in GOP primaries were ‘old’ Republicans rather ...”

“... Tory party in the first half of the 18th century and the romantic Toryism of Disraeli’s Young England in the 19th. The Tory party collapsed between the mid-1750s and early 1760s, and the previous two-party system was replaced by a dominant Whig consensus, in which various factions jostled for supremacy. Among these was the Rockingham group ...”

“... belonged, and his success in becoming part of it as a confirmation of social status. His brother Warren, an officer in the RASC, took the same view of the Army. They remained inseparable all their lives, Lewis both accepting and to some extent controlling his brother’s heavy drinking. When he got religion Lewis found himself in an anomalous position, an ...”

“... as well as everybody else that an awful lot of it wasn’t. The Slits may have started out as very young, rather posh, utterly unmusical Sex Pistols groupie-girls, but they had long, unspikey hair and unpunklike girly little frocks; their music was no garage-thrash drone but a vertiginously spare and reggae-like space filled with words from women conceived of ...”

“... figured out you were probably OK, unless Bruno just flat didn’t like you or the way you looked. Young, in general, was not a good look. Young female trumped male, but the young lady was supposed to be just that, a lady. Halter tops and nose-rings didn’t fly. Manners were big with ...”

“... lies in its anatomy of 18th-century portraiture under various heads: portraits of children, of young girls, of men of learning, of military and professional men, of actors and of women. None of these could be termed a neglected area, yet Wind constantly illuminates well-worn issues. He re-animates the tired exercise of comparing and contrasting Reynolds ...”