Search Results

“... Though​ Barbara Walter frames her book as a warning to America, her staccato forays into recent civil wars in dozens of countries only gradually accustom the reader to her habit, after recounting a number of fratricidal horrors, of pointing a dreadful finger at the United States. Beware! You too may one day poke your cellphone through the curtains to film shaky clips of fires and explosions on the horizon of your suburb, it may be your feet crunching on the bloodied glass of a bombed café, it may be your loved one taken away by masked good old boys with customised AR-15s, death’s head armbands and Ford F-150 technicals ...”

“... is among the best, and will appeal to, and beyond, the readership of the series as a whole. What Walter Nash sets out to achieve is in the utmost degree traditional, and in the utmost degree original. The subtitle (‘A study of compositional problems and methods’) might suggest that his undertaking is no more than a rhetoric in modern dress. In fact, the ...”

“... story as the ‘Clerk’s Tale’, and it provokes howls of outrage in every classroom. When Walter, the carefree Marquis of Saluzzo, is pressured by his barons into taking a wife, he shocks them by choosing Griselda, a poor but virtuous peasant. At first this unexpected union seems to confirm his wisdom. Walter has ...”

“... The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen Fields, open Racecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying that there are such things as races. Race today does not, they point out, refer to ‘a traditionally named group of people’ but to ‘a statistically defined population’. So, for example, the determining factor in susceptibility to sickle cell anaemia, long thought of as a ‘black disease’, is whether you have ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do ...”

“... women have stepped in to fill the vacuum. It is more likely to be Harriet Harman, Clare Short, Barbara Follett, the recently ennobled Helena Kennedy or even Cherie Booth, of whom the ‘ordinary woman’ will have heard and whom she will admire. As Joan Smith notes in Different for Girls, a collection of writings on women and culture, the most loved female ...”

“... Barbara Pym’s posthumous novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, begins with an echo of Pride and Prejudice. Rupert Stonebird, an eligible bachelor, has just moved into a middle-class neighbourhood. Two of its women walk past his house to size him up. Perhaps he will make a suitable husband for the vicar’s wife’s sister, Penny, or perhaps for the faded librarian Ianthe Broome ...”

“... and displays an endearing capacity for romantic aberration, as when he assumes from her name that Barbara Windsor must be one of our royal house, the Third Princess after Di and Fergie. Being the creation of a woman, he feels that women are his most plausible interpreters. In this particular connection, however, he makes observations that can be taken as ...”

“... Fifty years ago, Walter Ong startled classicists with the proposal that learning Latin offered medieval and Renaissance boys a rite of passage not unlike Bushman puberty rites. Torn from the company of women, the initiate was sequestered with his peers in a clubhouse-like schoolroom, trained in the special language of an elite, disciplined by flogging, and formed by a regimen geared to inculcate moral and intellectual toughness ...”

“... murs lépreux questionnés par la lumiére, émergeait la face blême et bouffie de l’ennui.’ Barbara Wright surmounts the biggest problems in translating Tournier with idiomatic ease and inventiveness, so it’s odd to find her lapsing now and again into un-English Latinisms like ‘inexistence’ for inexistence, ‘marmoreal’ for marmoréen, or ...”

“... Tales’s harrowing legend of an abused wife, takes place in Lombardy: Griselda’s husband, Walter, is modelled in part on Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan. Her story is more than a narrative about gender or a religious allegory; it is an object lesson in tyranny. Some tales are set even further afield: ‘The Squire’s Tale’ at the court of Genghis ...”

“... that one of them was a woman. What’s more, the couple had been married and then divorced because Walter was such a stinker, then Walter decides to win her back. It’s a wild game, but hold on to the relentless male supremacy that Grant gives the guy and which even today is swallowed by audiences as charming. Grant was ...”

“... he imagined, ‘ideal’ for the Third Programme. McWhinnie agreed and passed the material on to Barbara Bray, the producer of All That Fall, who got to work on the translation I’ve just quoted. Beckett was still commending Le Square the following spring as he finished Krapp’s Last Tape, of which he wrote years later: ‘A woman’s tone goes through the ...”

“... He recognised, but resisted, the temptations that Lévi-Strauss is so caustic about, telling Sir Walter Scott that he would not render his travels more marvellous by introducing ‘circumstances which, however true, were of little or no moment, as they related solely to his own personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or ...”

“... doing something. Nine of the protesters – among them Howe, Crichlow, Altheia Jones-LeCointe and Barbara Beese – were brought to trial at the Old Bailey, charged with ‘incitement to riot and affray’. Howe chose to defend himself from the dock, and made his case to great effect. On 16 December 1971, after 55 days of argument, the judge – concluding ...”

“... peacefully sails out to sea, leaving the city in its own quiet self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame ...”