Search Results

“... hangers-on, ‘terrorists’ and the occasional gangster. Several of Campbell’s principals – Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Jérôme Lindon, Maurice Girodias – also turn up in Lennon’s story, like Balzac’s recurring characters or, less charitably, like figures in some bizarre soap opera. Naturally, the principal locale is the café or the ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... poems, which contain lines like these, in ‘Star Damage at Home’, from the 1969 collection The White Stones:                               ... That some star not included in the middle heavens should pine in earth, not shine above the skys and those cloudy vapours? That it really should burn with fierce heat, explode its ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”

“... of South African life. An Indian girl sits in a ‘No Blacks’ library and is arrested; a white school official becomes prominent in the Liberal Party; his life is threatened and shots are fired at his house; black farmers in white areas are evicted, their land taken and their houses destroyed; a ‘Proud ...”

“... claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and England’s pushiest peer, had twice attempted to sideline Henry VI, who suffered from lengthy spells of mental illness and was repelled by the ...”

“... life, Hannah Arendt wrote:the real danger is not [Black] violence but the possibility of a white backlash of such proportions as to be able to invade the domain of regular government. Only such a victory at the polls could stop the present policy of integration. Its consequence would be unmitigated disaster – the end, perhaps not of the country, but ...”

“... grâce. It’s a gesture, Frink said, that she owed to the final moments of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, where Richard is viciously stabbed by a swarm of Lancastrian soldiers. He falls, then writhes and jerks in painful spasms, each marked in William Walton’s score by a dissonant chord. Then he collapses, his sword ...”

“... the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Both these spaces were industrial structures redesigned by Richard Gluckman, who is as much an architect of the Dia aesthetic – a Modernist transparency of structure rendered with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the ...”

“... about whom and Harriet Beecher Stowe he writes his best criticism, the father is obviously White Master, though there is also White Mistress, in whose capacity to read and write, and in her willingness to teach them both to a young slave, Douglas begins to discover the instrument both of freedom and revenge. Fear of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it. ‘Adèle has been ...”

“... would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the black kids, who belongs to the ...”

“... the great Purity Demonstration in Hyde Park, attended by van-loads of young girls dressed in white, which promoted the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Afterwards, in 1887, he persuaded the police to use their powers under this Act to close brothels in Tower Hamlets. In the words of Charrington’s admiring biographer, ‘our ...”

“... No doubt the soldiers of the Red Army felt justified in slaughtering the wounded remnants of the White Russian armies they found in Prague’s hospitals in 1945, but it makes it no less of an atrocity. Given the sheer scale of the horrors perpetrated in Eastern Europe by German forces and racial officials, the temptation to say that they deserved what they ...”