Search Results

“... You watch your mother slice up a lengthy white radish and boil it over an open fire. The sun has banished the dew, and even unwell as you are, you no longer feel cold.’ The following day, despite your illness – you have hepatitis E; ‘its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral’ – your parents take you and your older brother and sister from your village to live in the city, ‘the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia ...”

“... separate farms where tobacco and grain were the main crops, each worked by slaves directed by a white manager. There were also woodlands teeming with game, experimental gardens, stables, shops for carpenters, blacksmiths and other craftsmen, and a mansion, where Washington and his wife lived, attended by slaves dressed in red and ...”

“... dignity and self-respect, and thinks they have a case against American society – but thinks the white student radicals were just spoilt and ungrateful kids, peeing on the carpet that welcomed them. One of these delinquents, famously photographed during the occupation smoking a cigar, with his feet on the university president’s desk, later called to ask ...”

“... Lincoln’s contribution to the purification of the language has been persuasively discussed by Edmund Wilson: he inspired in others a similar ‘lucidity, precision and terseness’, a better rhetoric, a ‘language of responsibility’. Wilson’s discussion occurs in his study of the literature of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore, a book which Gore ...”

“... of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of ...”

“... and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential ...”

“... occasion a group of sea captains assured Pepys from personal experience that black corpses ‘look white and lose their blackness’ when drowned at sea. Pepys, the future president of the Royal Society, records this as a piece of interesting scientific trivia, acquired on ‘a fine pleasant walk’ from Greenwich to Woolwich. He doesn’t feel the need to ...”

“... what is more superannuated, more artistically mute and inexpressive, more absurdly camp, than a white marble statue of an old dead dude, surrounded by endless allegorical ladies? How many people have any idea that the first statues you encounter on your entry to the abbey – great stiff white marble men in half-classical ...”

“... not finished. The governess, having gone outside, looks in through the same window and her face ‘white as a sheet’ (like a ghost) frightens Mrs Grose, the housekeeper. Thus the governess’s face does appear in the same frame and is analogically linked to Quint’s. Professor Brooke-Rose follows up this insight with a whole series of ...”

“... After​ reading all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in 1945, Edmund Wilson concluded that there was nothing scary about stories full of words like ‘eerie’, ‘unhallowed’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘infernal’, ‘hellish’ and ‘unholy’, especially when these refer to an ‘invisible whistling octopus’ (the creature appears at the end of the 1928 story ‘The Call of Cthulhu ...”

“... for which Epstein takes – and is usually given – personal credit). The fall came with the white flight from the metropolis to the suburbs, leaving independent booksellers in the cities without walk-in custom. Enter, in 1969, the book chains, serving a ‘malled’ and wheeled America and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose ...”

“... the cultural shortcomings of the planters he encountered and appalled by the living conditions of white labourers. He had been led to believe that housing would be on a par with that in New England: Nine times out of ten, at least … I slept in a room with others, in a bed which stank, supplied with but one sheet, if with any; I washed with utensils common ...”

“... largely Southern materials, he stitches together the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver ...”

“... shamelessly.What was this? It was more than fame and more than glamour. And it was a bit less than Edmund Burke’s fierce gallantry on glimpsing the figure of Marie Antoinette. Yet there was history in it, somehow. The images of Dallas, and of the exquisitely grave widow at the state funeral, are the shared televisual experience of a generation. They also ...”

“... give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish Complex ...”