Search Results

“... The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The Country exemplifies a mode of contemporary writing almost sufficiently distinct to constitute a genre. The defining characteristic of a novel of this kind is that it seems to consist substantially ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”

“... in blunt granite and concrete in 1966. Its new headquarters, designed by Renzo Piano in elegant steel and glass, opened in Chelsea last May. For many months a cultural beacon in uptown Manhattan was dimmed, and the architectural dialogue between the inverted grey ziggurat of the Whitney on Madison Avenue and the expansive white spiral of the Guggenheim on ...”

“... narratives: Superman is simultaneously an epic-eternal hero who exists outside time (the Man of Steel), and a ‘consumable’ romantic-novelistic hero (Clark Kent) who gets older every week. These two types of hero also correspond to the double nature of the comics medium: a hybrid of words and pictures. Clark Kent, a print journalist, stands unmistakeably ...”

“... Miller argues that popular novelists like Marie Belloc Lowndes, Beatrice Harraden, Flora Annie Steel and Margaret Woods, all of whom were sympathetic to the Cause, ‘would have risked alienating their large reading public if they had infused their romance novels with controversial politics’. But one of Lowndes’s most successful novels, The Lodger ...”

“... from it. Through the sliding door I saw heaps of pigs lying on concrete floors inside pens with steel bars. They were caterwauling like people who had been tortured. It’s no wonder that one of the few workers I ever saw around the place gave me the stony, truculent look of a felon. An organic pig-farmer on Countryside Undercover remarked that ‘pigs have ...”

“... Christianity. The Church was a recent octagonal construction with a roof supported on visible steel girders: simple but by no means ugly. The walls were painted with scenes depicting the history of the Nicaraguan people: Pre-Colombian civilisation; the figure of a peasant facing the menacing figures of the Conquistador, the Gringo and Somoza; the ...”

“... called Man and Superman gives weight to the idea that Shaw’s promotion of theoretical Men of Steel contributed to his later affection for Stalin. Gibbs is quaintly apologetic for Shaw’s later political leanings: ‘It is, of course, well known that many Western intellectuals – including such leading literary figures as George Orwell, Kingsley Amis ...”

“... at a loss to an American dentist. Dumas rolled up his sleeves, sharpened a new quill (he hated steel nibs), and signed yet more new contracts. He had loathed the bourgeois reign of Louis-Philippe and, after the Revolution of 1848 had brought it to an end, stood as a liberal candidate in three elections held that year. Each time he polled only a few hundred ...”

“... ran a tapestry-repair company. The cannibal daughter worked there too. No account of the sculptor David Smith fails to notice his time as a welder on a production line; Bourgeois’s stitching should be thought of in the same way. A skill already learned, waiting to give a flavour of unusual competence to quite different constructions. When, in Seven in a ...”

“... with a craggy, rough piece of architecture. They have introduced a laconic, faintly Miesian black steel aesthetic for the shops, the escalators and the walkways linking the shops, which complements the scale and grandeur of the two halls (though the most impressive original space – the control room in Hall A – is, of course, reserved for private ...”

“... the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich acquired Chelsea, and 2008, when Sheikh Mansour bought City. David Moores, whose family (the founders of Littlewoods) invested in Liverpool Football Club in the 1960s, got £89 million for his 51 per cent stake when the club was sold to the US buyers Tom Hicks and George Gillett in a leveraged acquisition in 2007. Martin ...”

“... before the Revolution). Renamed first for the Ukrainian Trotsky and then as Stalino (for ‘steel’ not Stalin), the town was repopulated from elsewhere in the Soviet Union after the catastrophic man-made famine of the 1930s (which the Ukrainians now call the Holodomor). It was renamed Donetsk in 1961. No wonder, then, that what peoples and places are ...”

“... a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott ...”

“... This is a pity. The last five Liberal leaders (Sinclair, Clement Davies, Grimond, Thorpe and Steel) remain unsung. We know next to nothing of what a Liberal leader does, and we know no more from the Thorpe case. There are some sections of the Sunday Times book which are miniature essays on aspects of Mr Thorpe’s ordinary career. A chapter on him as an ...”