Search Results

“... who can articulate human words without having a human tongue; presents a critique of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the story of a man mesmerised and still articulate after the point of death; and so neatly on to some illuminating remarks on the oldest documents of the Western tradition, the funeral inscriptions of ...”

“... turnover of workers at Fordlandia was many times higher than in Dearborn. With a fishing line, a little plot of manioc, a pig, a rifle and a bit of foraging, anyone could subsist. The cash to buy the kerosene, matches, machetes, cloth, salt and gunpowder needed to make good this independence could be earned by brief spells of wage labour. Like the ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... as I folded my legs on that bridge, the moment I looked up to address some stranger with my bogus little request, I felt I was no longer part of the places I knew. I felt I’d been here for years; already I burned with resentments that normally take time to kindle. I had never been among the walkers-past, I was sure – though, in fact, I had never been ...”

“... endangered, diseased and ultimately – and this is Matthew’s point – put to death. Perhaps a little history here. It was in Bewley’s Museum over Grafton Street that I first met Matthew Sweeney. It was Dublin and springtime of 1989. The Irish launch of his fourth collection, Blue Shoes, occurred the day before a reading I was giving in the upper room of ...”

“... or heroic Steve Biko there were always likely to be several murderous Harry Gwalas, fraudulent Allan Boesaks and others who were merely time-servers or buffoons. Because of colonial guilt, because of false parallels with the US civil rights struggle, because of a bad conscience over race relations in general, many saw the South African struggle as ...”

“... in front of his other loutish house guests. In the film, however (co-written, as it happens, by Allan Scott, who was also one of the writers on Don’t Look Now) this episode is infinitely more disturbing. The squire, nastily played by Kenneth Cranham, turns out to have a penchant not for gentle ribbing but for full-blown black magic rituals. Parson Adams ...”

“... anthologies appeared; it became fashionable to neglect our own work and to write clubby little essays for each other about ‘What Feminist Criticism Means to Me’. The larger world receded, and so did whatever sense of mission the pioneers had had. Gubar explains Elaine Showalter’s withdrawal from feminism in a manner I find shocking: ‘Around ...”

“... is also described as a ‘seam’, plausibly a place where interdimensional threads might get a little frayed. On top of the home invasion set-up and the understated sci-fi premise, there are scattered hints of horror movie, such as the unspeaking person at Viv’s birthday party, who wears an elaborate costume in keeping with the undersea theme but may ...”

“... The mother’s name, for a start, is Lenore, and therefore, thanks to two famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe (the name features in ‘The Raven’ as well as ‘Lenore’ itself), steeped in death as a set of literary conventions, something that happens in books. The associations are all the stronger for not being commented on – there’s no weary ...”

“... it is only an hypothesis, like any other. The degree of assent you give it may depend on how little or how much the process is complicated by bringing into it the possibilities of human resistance and discrimination with respect to signs. Or it may depend on the degree to which the process is or is not considered unique to this century. Is reality any ...”

“... Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity,’ Chesterton remarked. Edgar Allan Poe spoke of ‘the fervid rush and whirl of her genius’. Their essays are still the best on her poetry because they respond so fully to her appetite for risk, her dislike of verse that opts for ‘some safe sigh/Cooped up in music ’twixt an oh and ...”

“... in chemistry was nourished by ‘a Home Chemistry set’ in a pink cardboard box that contained little pillboxes of sulphur, iron filings, charcoal etc, and doubtless also – my own memory stirs – of lycopodium powder, a plant spore with pyrotechnic possibilities. It so happened that one of the best-known firms of laboratory furnishers was just by an ...”

“... misprision of the master’s most famous chord progression. At a stroke (or should one say, with a little gentle stroking), the prelude blasphemed against the necessity and the high seriousness of the German musical tradition. It showed that there could be other ways of doing things: different scales, different arrangements of common chords, perfectly ...”

“... The earliest poem collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s miscellaneous drafts and fragments, opens: I introduce Penelope Gwin, A friend of mine through thick and thin, Who’s travelled much in foreign parts Pursuing culture and the arts. ‘And also,’ says Penelope ‘This family life is not for me ...”