Search Results

“... is spilt religion, which, as in late 19th-century England, finds peculiar outlets. In one fable Edmund Ignatius MacHugh frenetically founds cults and dispatches newsletters: the Field Day Anthology is a long newsletter from a section of the Irish intelligentsia.The conflict in, and about, Northern Ireland has renewed a struggle for cultural hegemony that ...”

“... Europeans: splendid, dear Britons, your debates have not been so interesting to us since Edmund Burke dissected the French Revolution’ (Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung). ‘The fact that the German European “discourse” assumes as a matter of course that the end of European unification will be the end not only of the German ...”

“... canon, including James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and the Memoirs of the regicide Edmund Ludlow. It wasn’t that Whig Presbyterians were against monarchy; rather, they argued that popular consent was the only acceptable basis for kingly government. The Presbyterianism of the upwardly mobile Stewarts was considerably diluted over the course of ...”

“... of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the interior workings of tapeworms (cestodes, or endoparasitic platyelmia). Hard to make a bestseller out of that. More ...”

“... well represented by writers who weren’t New York intellectuals at all. We could think of Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, many more. But Mrs Trilling’s point is important. What hides in the phrase ‘general culture’ is the belief that literature and culture and politics are connected, that controversy is good and bad for the mind and ...”

“... and to the words describing them.’ Hazlitt has this double relish in mind when he discusses Burke, whose ‘execution, like that of all good prose, savours of the texture of what he describes, and his pen glides or drags over the ground of his subject, like the painter’s pencil’. This commentary has a gusto of its own: description is rendered ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through ...”

“... charm that fascinated Henry James and all those other competent Late Victorians (Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, Charles Baxter) who worried interminably about the great question, ‘what to do with Louis?’ Perhaps they need not have worried. ‘Thin legged! thin-chested!’ Louis revealed considerable ability to look after himself and boss others in his ...”

“... concerned with the economic impact of slavery, don’t live up to Stowe’s comments, though Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, was too harsh in claiming that ‘Olmsted, in the literary sense, was a very bad writer.’ But he certainly wrote better about things like trees, rocks and streams than he did about economics. In the late summer of 1857 Olmsted ...”

“... Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Melville, Thomas Hardy and the author of Ecclesiastes are also members. Edmund Blunden thought The City of Dreadful Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter Bell’ are set before it. Thomson takes his place in a tradition ...”

“... himself. There are times when his tirades against his East India Company employers bring to mind Edmund Burke’s later, rather more eloquent assaults on the same institution, which also take a smack at the sexual crimes of the colonialists. Rather as Burke was both Irish outsider and champion of English tradition, so ...”

“... Basil is Waugh’s version of Marlow, a man possessed of the indomitable urge to survive – Edmund Wilson called it ‘perverse, unregenerate self-will’ – that characterises his greatest shits. A cadge and a waster who has grown bored of his desultory life in London (‘Isn’t London hell?’), Basil travels to the remote land of Azania. There he ...”

“... the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the ...”

“... causes of the Revolution to its more unpleasant and violent manifestations. In particular, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France onwards, conservatives employed stories of actual or invented human suffering (Marie Antoinette’s plight, for instance) to undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution ...”

“... remained ‘the traditional whipping-boy’ of English satire. Like many a later pornographer, Edmund Curll, whom Wagner dubs ‘the tsar of English pornography’, had a trick of dressing up his wares with lurid catchpenny titles. In this, too, Wagner has caught the true Grub Street flourish. His subtitle, ‘Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and ...”