Search Results

“... a long day. What are you drinking? This kind of thing can be a little tiring when it’s done straight, and at length, and in his critical notes and autobiographical essays Mamet certainly tries too hard for the wise and pithy effect. He’s always interesting, but he’s also busy being smart, and he’s hooked on the myth of the American writer as ...”

“... of the Red Army, A.A. Ignat’ev. On the cover there is a photograph of Uncle Alyosha sitting straight-backed, legs akimbo, red stars on his collar, his black boots glistening, his hands folded over a sword resting on his knee. He holds his chin stiffly erect and he has exactly the same thin amused smile, the same superbly assured carriage as in the ...”

“... process went on, often in very different ways, through the following centuries. In time there came straight fiction. The best of the Dürer novels is Ludwig Tieck’s unfinished The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald: A Story of Old Germany, published in 1798. Its underlying theme is tension between simplicity and complexity again, art and morality, and some other ...”

“... knowingly, so unanxiously embraced – as legend. The characters and the settings of the film come straight from the Ellroy novel, the third in a group he calls the LA Quartet. The others are The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere and White Jazz. The plot of the novel has been compressed and slightly switched for the film, bits of dialogue and the occasional death ...”

“... served by our own most recent literary hoax. I have before me a press hand-out from the firm of Michael Joseph: WE BELIEVE THAT NEVER BEFORE HAS A CELEBRATED WRITER OF FICTION SO SUCCESSFULLY DISGUISED HER IDENTITY AND CREATED SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IN PUBLISHING AND NEVER BEFORE HAS A WRITER AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS WRITTEN TWO SUCH POWERFUL AND MOVING ...”

“... moment, represents the voice of ‘youth’ is peculiar enough. REM’s lead singer and lyricist, Michael Stipe, is knocking on 40; other members of the group are older (one, the percussionist Bill Berry, has taken early retirement, on grounds of advanced age and poor health). Stipe is as close in age to Roger Scruton as to Liam Gallagher and, on photographic ...”

“... sentences’, and that ‘no one thought Mrs Trilling heaves into my thoughts lands straight.’ But for her the students had not simply taken over a large university, they had stormed the house of reason, desecrated some noble, elective family of the mind. ‘I admit a possible bias,’ she says. ‘One marries into a university much as one ...”

“... and salvific cults, syncretic borrowings from the Indus to the Atlantic. Sidebottom takes us straight to the most apt comparison: only a few years after Heliogabalus’ death, a young man in Mesopotamia documented the visions that terrified him even as they convinced him of his mission to reveal the stark realities of a world of evil matter and good ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... the biggest takings in their history.’ My indecision is final is a perfect title, taking us straight into the language of Sam Goldwyn (‘Include me out’). It also conveys very neatly the flavour of much movie talk, at once emphatic and illusory. The book is (innocently) full of cherishable ...”

“... speculation on speed and stillness in the modern city. Here Prendergast makes clear and gets straight what has been bothering him throughout the book, a sort of tug of war between innocence and sophistication, or between confidence and scepticism, all seen as disabling. If we say we know the city, we say too much; if we say we don’t, we appear to have ...”

“... related feature of our European tradition. It may be that realism doesn’t have to be either straight or magical; and that play doesn’t preclude pain or historical sense. Realism could be allusive and self-constructing; we might believe in it because it was made up. When Saramago speaks, in The Stone Raft, of the ‘persistent indifference’ which ...”

“... a little glum, but she is surprised into the warmest of smiles, seems entirely open, vulnerable, straight. The evidence of Modotti’s art is clear. She wanted to ask a certain question of life, and she asked it incomparably. We have her question; it is in almost every photograph she took. But the life leaves us wondering not only how this ...”

“... one of the surprising triumphs of the book is a pair of parody rustics who seem to have stepped straight out of Cold Comfort Farm – until we realise that that is the effect they are after, that the parody is theirs, not the author’s. ‘He don’t know no secrets,’ one of them says, provoking a London woman to a mock complaint about rural double ...”