Search Results

“... The first collection from the West Coast poet Fred Voss takes its title from the mythical aircraft company which is an amalgam of all the Californian machine shops that Voss has sweated in for the past 15 years. From his inconspicuous position as a machinist on the factory floor, Voss describes the conflicts and frustrations which daily beset the American blue-collar worker ...”

“... of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding and David Schubert. ‘I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,’ Ashbery says, and one can imagine some members of his audience gasping. In the introduction to his 1966 anthology, 19th-Century British Minor Poets, Auden provides four tests for being a ...”

“... Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden are the four volumes of Refugee Tales, directed by the poet David Herd and Anna Pincus of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. The project, which has been running since 2016, pairs contemporary writers with former indefinite detainees, retelling their stories and taking the Canterbury Tales as a model. It is a ...”

“... child. Before the law, or outside it? ‘How is the institution of the removal centre legal?’ David Herd asks in his afterword to Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories gathered from refugees by campaigners. ‘Since, in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law?’ There are for ...”

“... meanwhile allowing the virus to spread – so that the general population eventually acquired ‘herd immunity’. The plan did not involve mass testing, or technological tracking and contact tracing of the kind seen in South Korea and Singapore.The published minutes of the meetings of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and ...”

“... or a baseball cap today did not and does not signify that one is a member of some faceless herd. Hats can and do reveal, disguise or parody social status, while at the same time highlighting aspects of individual personality. Why, then, if men’s hats have been such a multivariate sign of class and personality, did they go the way of the corset? For ...”

“... should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I think, few ballpoint pens in 1940. On page 160 the idea that the USA passed straight from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar ...”

“... were arguing vigorously that the journals and other descriptive writings of explorers such as David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander MacKenzie were the first contributions to Canadian literature, and these works teem with a sense of the forests and prairies, lakes and rivers as the inexhaustible new land in which settlers had to strive to make ...”

“... in any country, including America, are ultimately helpless before what he calls the ‘electronic herd’ of stockbrokers, bond and currency dealers, mutual and pension fund executives, merchant bankers, individual investors and the financial advisers, analysts and journalists who swarm about them. This is the herd which ...”

“... It is doing something that affects survival, such as escaping, keeping up with the herd, hunting, migrating. These are the uses of movement. A similar criticism applies to many of the articles. If the book is to be about behaviour, it should surely deal with general activities and with the internal mechanisms that regulate them. For ...”

“... there. The two most familiar images of the men express the contrast eloquently. First, there is David’s brilliant portrait of Napoleon on his rearing charger in the Alps, seemingly master of the wind, rocks and sky; second, Chateaubriand’s acid description of Talleyrand hobbling into the presence of Louis XVIII with the help of Napoleon’s sinister ...”

“... be solved by vague appeals to the idea that co-operative behaviour is good for the flock, the herd or the species. There are alternatives, however. If altruists direct their helpful behaviour towards relatives, then the genes associated with altruism may spread, because they are present in the beneficiaries and transmitted to their offspring; or if ...”

“... to be drab places: their defiant survival into the age of the Amex Gold Card is evidence of the herd instinct of the newspaper trade. That instinct remains, in some respects, surprising. Journalists, after all, come in all shapes and sizes, with an especially strong line in outsize egos. Superficially, one might have expected the members of more ...”

“... enclosed, distinctive world of their own. There are very few good British novels about sport, and, David Peace aside, hardly any about football – despite its place in our culture. In A Natural, Raisin delves into the life of a lower league English football team – a subject never covered before, as far as I know, in literary fiction. Perhaps it doesn’t ...”

“... cowboy, suddenly coming into view to crack a whip or wave a hat or whoop whenever the slow-moving herd of facts threatens to come to a halt. The book can be heavy going, for all Koss’s talent as a herdsman. It is useless to read it unless the reader already has quite a close knowledge of British party-political history, or a general history of the period ...”