Search Results

“... For every booming bittern there are ten, for every cliff-stacked gannet mass there is at least one with his clingfilmed lunch-pack, wringing his socks on St Kilda. This is surety of sorts. That the index finger will go on twitching till the loch gives up its greylag, the moor its merlin, that even the chough has its hangers-on grim-jawed on outcrops where the breakers’ sting assures Him that all the aeons’ messy fuss holds some of them in thrall, despite the mockery ...”

“... We know you’ve got a thing about us, scuffing the earth at our feet, giving us a voice. Like this. We know about the groans we’ve heard, the yelps in moonlight, rumours of progeny. Bellies keep pressing us; we decline. Thunder on the moor and your effeteness assured, we think of us as crown whetted on the storm, not bald queans. We know about the influx of coach parties; the way their crisp-packet ordinariness ruffles you, the way they laugh as they count us ...”

“... Prints The dollardom shore of big Lake Michigan finds him doing what he did as a boy by real seas, running alongside them: the land’s hem stitched, he’d look back upon a long beach emptied by twilight (his spoor blurred as if already old), and turn it to Avalon, or Crusoe’s island. Even on the edge of Central Africa he had to change into somewhere else what they would always be alone with after the bush-drive; imagining this not ever seen, not watched, kept locked from eyes like a schoolgirl’s journal – older than lungs, earlier even than gill slits or the hair-like cilia of bivalves, the sea-edge stroking backwards through deep time and the blasts of geology, silvering his prints from laval sand with the stands of palm-trees cupped from sight by his hand ...”

“... The Strandir coast begins with a dirt track, the guttural end of tarmac in a waste of bared rock, grass and scree, and empty coves where great white trunks have floated from Siberia: they litter the vast and stony strands like matches if seen from afar, but down among them now they block our way in booms of perimeter barriers, logs pale as the long drowned, stripped of bark to the white of washed-up sea-tangle, unburied thigh-bones ...”

“... Drombeg County Cork Between the portals and the axials lay the central slab with its flotsam of euro-cents and hair-bangs, wet-scarred words, a Ryanair boarding pass kept from flight by a pebble. Just when the grey rain cleared enough to take a photograph and find the atmospherics I’d so looked forward to, your mobile rang. Our teenage son in Corsica, wild-camping with a hammock in the heatwave ...”

“... A modern witch is a Witch. The upper case denotes a self-consciousness born of safer times: Witchcraft is now a minority faith to be taken seriously (at least in the States), and there is even a Witches’ League for Public Awareness. They need it. For the broomsticks, black cats, green-hued hags with pointy hats – all the paraphernalia people remember from childhood – have been joined by rumours about something deeply sinister and very adult going on in the suburbs ...”

“... Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton (1992), was set in a fictional downland village, and traced its history from 17th-century isolation to M4 dormitory town. Thorpe told the story of this small English utopia in a mixture of letters, diaries and interviews. Each of the 12 sections of the novel is written in a different idiom, and can be read as a short story ...”

“... and the ‘strong magic’ of his African relics, puzzling over his mother’s disappearance. Adam Thorpe’s extraordinary first novel, Ulverton, laid the past down like sediment, each chapter a slice of time, beginning in 1650 and ending ‘Here’, and in that way producing a wholly convincing village history in which distant events continue to ...”

“... this same landscape, that Britain can never produce films of world stature). But here, anyway, is Adam Thorpe to prove the assumption triumphantly wrong, because his first novel is indeed a ‘palimpsest history’ of exceptional resonance and scope, even though its focus rests entirely on a single (fictional) English village, viewed over a period of ...”

“... 1957) and Alan Moore (born 1960), and from the two outstanding contributors to New Chatto Poets, Adam Thorpe (born 1956) and Alan Jenkins (born 1955). One might call these four poets ‘sophisticated’, though this perhaps means no more than that they are all, in one way or another, Francophiles, and that they write without inhibition of affaires de ...”

“... during the 1979 general election. This was part of his ‘oblique, crablike’ pursuit of Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party. Allegations that Thorpe had hired a hit man to dispose of his former lover Norman Scott had been cropping up since 1975, nowhere more persistently than in Private Eye. ...”

“... important to the scheme of the book – and three suitors are homing in on her virtue: Hoyt Thorpe, one of the obnoxious frat boys; Jojo Johanssen, the only white boy on the college basketball team; and Adam Gellin, a poor, resentful, Jewish scholarship student. Hoyt gets there first, when, after several hundred pages ...”

“... are 310 artists – painters, sculptors, architects, gem-carvers and engravers – from the Adam brothers to Wright of Derby. In Britain as elsewhere in Northern Europe and, indeed, in the states of Northern Italy, a visit to Rome was deemed an important if not an essential part of an artist’s education, although some who did not make it – Hogarth ...”

“... and guns, thereby beginning the cycle of trade all over again. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith ascribed the relative lack of African economic development to the ‘continual danger’ that supposedly confronted the continent’s inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went ...”

“... Austen’s sizeable band of (mainly female) fools and vulgarians, including Mrs Jennings, Isabella Thorpe and Miss Bates. The diagram sums up Burrows’s Austen, an artist remarkably in command of her medium. Whether by labour or by intuition, she controls her creatures and their language, down to the lowest and least of its parts. If there is to be argument ...”