Search Results

“... heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on Making It, ‘Up the Family Tree’, appeared in the ...”

“... of that famous list of Communist sympathisers Orwell was compiling in his last years. He has read many letters not previously accessible – for example, a great many to Orwell’s agent Leonard Moore – which make it even clearer than it already was that the writer and Victor Gollancz didn’t get on, though not ...”

“... I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza ...”

“... them, as she puts it with characteristic vagueness, or because, more mundanely, they have time to read several newspapers and thus to assimilate all points of view. Touchingly, the inveterate reformer suggests that the confinement of the sick helps to restore their faith in human progress – the gradual ‘amelioration’ of things being much more visible to ...”

“... down on his orders.Harry Freedman​ has written varied books about Jewish history and culture: on Leonard Cohen’s spiritual sources; the Talmud; the Kabbalah; Britain’s Jews. In Shylock’s Venice, he has taken a broad brush to the history of Venice’s Jews, producing a book of lightly informative anecdotes about various residents of the ghetto, or ...”

“... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...”

“... It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.’ It’s a way of being both alive and dead within a single sentence.In the early 1970s Johnson did an MFA at the University of Iowa and came under the influence of Raymond Carver, who had yet to receive his late acclaim and was still in full-blown ...”

“... to this much less damaging daytime jaunt. When I look up cute hoor, I’m directed to hoor and read as follows: HE version of ‘whore’ hore. The pronunciation/hu[e]r/ was common in England in the 16th and 17th centuries and lasted into the 19th century. Hiberno-English retains this older pronunciation, while the meaning has become extended from ...”

“... on the scene at the last minute, hot, tired, ill or drunk (sometimes all of these together), read out their piece and depart. Some wanker called ‘Caserly’ (that just has to be a false name, probably someone on the editorial staff) has written an open letter to the (Western Evening) Herald saying how arrogant and ‘out of touch’ (yeah) I am, will ...”

“... There was no question of a love match. Nevertheless, Florence must have found it painful to read the extraordinary poems Hardy was writing in memory of Emma. Her letters soon begin to cloud with dejection. Like Emma, she was to be childless. Lacking Emma’s spiky feminism – she believed that women were ‘only strong when they realise their weakness ...”

“... she lost the baby, but still wanted Lane to marry her. The hero of marriages is the yeoman Leonard Wheatcroft, who pursued Elizabeth Hawley (‘very fortunate, besides beautiful’) for two years – it took a year of love-letters and months of hand-holding to get Elizabeth’s consent, men weeks of haggling with her father to get his. Arrangements ...”

“... immersion in that environment, and set off the strangeness of the language of Vietnam veteran Leonard Meadows: ‘He mentioned stuff like phosphorous rounds and grenade launchers and flamethrowers as if they were normal parts of the world and just sitting around there in the room to be touched and handled and used on an everyday basis.’ The two ...”

“... disasters in which the book delights. Striking, too, is the fact that her youngest brother, Leonard, who died in infancy, much to Gwen’s distress when she was 14, is simply omitted from her narrative and from the family tree included in her book. But Spalding is too loyal to her subject to face the likelihood that now at least (the nostalgic 1950s may ...”

“... to sleep each night. Over the next three decades he became the survivor who wrote the most but was read the least, producing more than thirty books of history (The Administered Man, a study of the deportations of German Jewry), sociology (The Experience of Powerlessness, a study of camp organisation), poetry and fiction, all published on a shoestring in West ...”

“... In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve to death; Peter Adamson (Len Fairclough of Coronation Street), on trial for indecently assaulting children; and, most famously, the comedian Ken ...”