Search Results

“... original rejection was based on an underestimation of his seriousness: according to the present-day Guardian critic Michael Billington, Coward’s exploration of ‘the thin dividing line between sex and savagery’ in Private Lives puts him on a par with Strindberg. A rather different reassessment is provided by Dan Rebellato, whose revisionist ...”

“... with the clamorous rise of bourgeois Italy. In a series of works over the past decade, Sebastian Barry has captured the flow and recoil of modern Irish history in the blighted destinies of the Dunne family. Taken together, The Steward of Christendom, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way and now On Canaan’s Side constitute a kind of Oresteia of 20th-century ...”

“... year. So if we want we can take this as a history painting; and for anyone who happened to spend a day on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie in the latter days of East Germany, the painting’s aroma of ‘something that has come to an end and goes no further’, as Tuymans puts it, seems entirely authentic. ‘The Secretary of ...”

“... little coat on.’ She squatted down and unzipped the big shopping bag she carried with her every day. It had check on the side that matched the dog’s topknot. It looked heavy; she was rumoured to have a fat leather purse. She rummaged in, and took out a contraption which she dangled in the air, a little blanket with straps to go under his belly. Rose ...”

“... in 1999 and 64 in 2001, but he has never held the single-season record. That currently belongs to Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, who in 2001 hit the ball out of the park an unprecedented 73 times. McGwire, Sosa and Bonds don’t resemble Roger Maris in physical appearance, but they don’t look much like Babe Ruth either. They are all ...”

“... can’t let him go, there’s a three-quarters cold case they need his help with. And Sebastian Barry is a writer who in his darksome romances offers, perhaps even craves, proximity to popular films, to genre, to Westerns and war movies and noir. He does a stunning set piece, often of a violent nature (say, the all-Ireland boxing match in A Long Long Way ...”

“... and women in his letters, he was not an antisemite, or sexist – at least by the standards of his day. This is letting him off too easily. The question of antisemitism has little to do with the content of Renoir’s paintings, but the depiction of women is central, and should have been probed more deeply – not by reading the letters, but through a closer ...”

“... floor, a hyena skin, the mouth still gaping wide with carnivorous lust. Across the compound lived Barry, getting on now but still a legendary crocodile hunter. Barry’s wife, Jane, insisted on giving me a haircut as I sat under the giant baobab and listened to Barry. ‘Only got bitten ...”

“... front and back flaps – oh! the patented Brooks version of the Giaconda smile, the one that, as Barry Paris says, isn’t so much a ‘come hither’ look as a look that says, to each and every gender: ‘I’ll come to you.’ (If, that is, she likes the look of you – a big if, in fact.) That straightforward look of hers is what makes these 60-year-old ...”

“... route. The title story in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, the only one not set in present-day America, is narrated by a middle-aged Viking. Harald would much rather stay at home with his wife than set off on yet another bloodthirsty raid, but on Lindisfarne there is a monastery to sack and villagers to disembowel, and a man can’t turn down a ...”

“... was apparently untroubled by the conversion.) Barack went to a mission school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, walking three miles but, unlike his classmates, wearing shoes. His father told him: ‘I want you to go beyond where I am.’ On returning home each day, the boy was required to recite sums to his father while ...”

“... work as he conceived of it has not really been acknowledged and absorbed by the philosophy of our day. His influence, however great, has been indirect. It has usually led others in directions precisely opposite to the spirit of his own teaching. He had a direct and devastating effect as a young man on Russell at the height of his powers around 1912. But ...”

“... One of the many excellent photographs Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were unsporting ...”

“... Many of the 17 ‘essays’ in Barry Lopez’s About This Life are fragments of memoir: snapshots of the day of a mother’s death from cancer; early road trips up and down America; Jesuit prep school in Manhattan; childhood years in California; a tributary career in photography ...”

“... Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its origins. The first horns sent signals across dark forests; they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch ...”