Search Results

“... between defiance and misgiving. In 1810 Shelley went to Oxford, where he met and beguiled Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and languished over his rejection by his cousin Harriet Grove, who was frightened by the unorthodoxy of his ideas; he was soon sent down for co-authoring, with Hogg, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ (though he wavered about acknowledging his ...”

“... who not many months before had refused to act on the verdict of a jury that another escaped slave, Thomas Lewis, was not the property of his former owner, refused now to accept that the slave-owner Stewart’s return to the writ of habeas corpus, namely that Somersett was his property, was capable of justifying his detention. Mansfield was well aware of ...”

“... With the inevitable exceptions of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx, it is doubtful whether any political thinker has inspired more sustained imbecility among his friends and enemies than Edmund Burke. And, despite first appearances, his appeal is far less predictable than theirs. Both Aquinas and Marx were in the first place theoreticians: the latter died at his desk, the former should have done ...”

“... sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed.’ Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his belief that ‘physical life’ is the highest value we can know, includes a refusal of what he saw as the ...”

“... still in its early stages, Newman and three others formed a band called Wire. The bassist, Graham Lewis, ‘a fashion graduate doing freelance design for London boutiques’, tells Reynolds they chose the name for its ‘graphic quality’. At first, such signs of ambition beyond the usual rock moves – Wire also liked to stand still onstage, like mannequins ...”

“... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...”

“... theme gruesomely and exhaustively. Madoc braids together an extraordinary number of narratives – Lewis and Clark’s 1805 journey West, a hypothetical account of Coleridge and Southey’s attempts to found a Utopian community in Pennsylvania, the political career of Thomas Jefferson’s Vice-President Aaron ...”

“... Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable elections. Of ...”

“... in various newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... single line or narrative has been found to accommodate the diverse poetries of Tennyson, Browning, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Arnold, Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. There are suggestive affiliations, as between Barnes and Hopkins, but no single narrative has explanatory power. A study of the emergence of modern poetry would need at least six lines of ...”

“... Hemingway in Key West; the most appropriate Stevens’s refusing to speak at a memorial for Dylan Thomas, whom he thought of as ‘an utterly improvident person’.Stevens, trained as a lawyer, worked for most of his life for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was born in 1879, of Dutch-German descent, in Reading, Pennsylvania; attended ...”

“... programmes are popular), but Couscous is out. If you look up Lévi-Strauss, you will find only Lewis, Carl, sprinter. Linguistics is in, and even ‘structural linguistics’, which is defined as ‘viewing the world in terms of structure’, but there is no entry for structure, still less structuralism. This Pan volume emphasises just how much ...”

“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed. David Selznick came of age in that world. His father, Lewis Selznick, was an early, unsuccessful mogul. In a line not quoted here, he allegedly told his sons: ‘Live expensively! Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was ...”

“... add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses of plagiarism before the fact. (Agapē Agape does recall Concrete, a Bernhard novel about a writer unable to begin a biography of a composer.) In the end, as the dying man works to get his ...”