Search Results

“... Everything seemed to find definition that spring – a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The rhythms of perception heightened. The whole enterprise of consciousness accelerated. We were gods that morning ... We marched as far as – where was it? – Glenties! All of 23 ...”

“... Charles Willeford​ is in a category all of his own in the annals of American crime writing. He is neither glamorous nor pulpy; he didn’t write airport fiction and he didn’t write bestsellers with aspirations to literature. He simply wrote crime fiction as though reporting real life. Hoke, a TV series based on the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been announced in the US; it will star Paul Giamatti, the shlub from Sideways ...”

“... full of useful and unsubstantiated facts, including the information that I shared a birthday with Charles Dickens, the Appalachian banjo-player Dock Boggs, and Julius Caesar. All other authorities seem to agree, however – and it’s only just occurred to me to check this – that Julius Caesar was born in the middle of July. Unhelpfully, few of them say ...”

“... You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’ Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit. He looked at his buttery bills too, and noted when the shoemaker’s son had money to spend; noted when (unless he was starving himself) he was absent from college ...”

“... are of particular interest; and others like them may yet be found. The discovery of the play Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the work of Jane Austen and her niece Anna, suggests that there may even yet be additions to the small body of literary manuscripts. There, at present, the documentary record ends; and the biographer must constantly allow for ...”

“... the main feature. When they started out in 1982, the group published a statement of intent: ‘We hope with the involvement of the community to bring alternative news to the general public.’ The audio is lost, but the slides have been digitised and many of them are once again available, via an exhibition at the Hackney Museum (temporarily closed) and an ...”

“... and ameliorative policies become an obligation which no humane society can avoid and still hope to hold its head high in the civilised world. One might naturally take the heyday of this style of thinking to be the period between 1960 and 1980. Levels of economic growth in the early part of the period helped to build up a commitment to the welfare state ...”

“... Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post ...”

“... According to that view, there was not much wrong with the Church of England until Charles I and Archbishop Laud got their hands on it in the 1620s. Since 1559, the Church, episcopal in structure yet Calvinist in doctrine, had secured a wide base of support and become an instrument of national stability. The Laudians, by their destruction of ...”

“... that this is a partial and simplified version of a tortuous argument: an accurate version, I hope. In the book it is backed up by much material on Elizabethan demonology, by minute considerations of the Faust tradition, by some highly speculative but delightful aperçus about the character and circumstances of the shadowy ‘P.F.’. At times Empson can ...”

“... watching the political disarray in the US and the failure of various US security plans, there is hope that the US and its local allies are on the verge of defeat: a sentiment encouraged by the enduring belief on the Islamist wing of the insurgency that with God on their side victory is certain. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government, and the parties and militias on ...”

“... become France. The publisher’s blurb for House of Lilies claims that the Capetians – Charles IV, who died in 1328, was the last king in the direct line – ‘did not simply rule France: they created it.’To what extent does Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s book justify the claim that the dynasty can be credited with the formation of national ...”

“... on a transcendent scale: just how transcendent you can see by looking at one of the tables in Charles Williams’s book, which shows Bradman, with his lifetime Test average of 99.94, almost forty runs an innings ahead of any other player, the run-rich Lara included. Not that a single hit for four would have done for me that day; I wanted to sit through a ...”

“... has been delayed until 2016.) The first line of the first draft for the book that was to become Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of Advanced Capitalism is about allegory: ‘Tout pour moi devient allégorie,’ ‘for me everything becomes allegory.’ This epigraph is from Baudelaire’s poem ‘The Swan’. In it the poet thinks of ...”

“... still doesn’t have electricity or running water. It hasn’t had any since February 1990, when Charles Taylor – former warlord, later president, currently in exile in Nigeria, where he’s still causing trouble, according to the Coalition for International Justice, funding armed groups and political parties across West Africa – sent his militia to take ...”