Search Results

“... been away to boarding-school. Amongst my year my only companion in these disadvantages was Donald Swann, the musician. A science teacher, who had the schoolmaster’s eye for the frailties of those whom he was supposed to teach, called us ‘the Swollheim’. The name allowed massive economies in sarcasm. Two attempts to prepare me for my new life were ...”

“... in music and speed-reading, and were superb athletes. All the boys were altar boys. The eldest, Donald, was a football star, wrestling star, track star, a good-looking boy who dated a cheerleader. In 1965, as a student at Colorado State, he jumped into a bonfire – he couldn’t say why – and needed treatment for burns. A few months later, he went back ...”

“... to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston. Houston was blond and wholesome, and had a long career, much of it in B-movies; it’s interesting to think that John Osborne might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth ...”

“... as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, Logue boasted to the director Lindsay Anderson that he had a future as ‘the only English poet/film star’. To which Anderson responded, sighing: ‘You will never be a star. You might become a featured player specialising in intellectual villains, artistic misfits etc.’ ‘Dear John ...”

“... take it lying down: no longer a sportsman but still a man. Storey adapted his original novel for Lindsay Anderson, who directed the film, but he curtailed the ending. On the printed page, after Machin’s legs have ‘betrayed’ him on the pitch, there is a final scene in the changing-room. The players have had their communal bath. Someone, inevitably, has ...”

“... seems a flimsy pretence. Yet for all its flaws, American Psycho was prophetic in its invocation of Donald Trump as aspirational monster-mogul and endures as an exhibit of slasher-film iconography owing to Mary Harron’s screen adaptation from 2000. The film’s spotless scene design (everything showroom shiny, the downtown loft as laboratory, anticipating the ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... what mothers give and resent giving, of what daughters learn and hate learning. Helen isn’t what Donald Winnicott in 1953 called a ‘good enough mother’ – not by a long shot. But she gave what she could: she didn’t abort Jo, she kept her alive and taught her what she knew of the world. Jo knows, and hates, that she’s repeating the script: ‘I ...”

“... in Life by Other Means are warm in their praise of Enright’s sanity, humanity and intelligence. Donald Davie agrees that Enright is ‘deeply humane, indeed humanitarian’, but then argues that this humanitarianism continually inhibits his poetry. Davie suggests that the pressure of the responsibilities entailed on Enright by his refusal to accept the ...”

“... rather than to consider them as poems. In just this way, the author, despite strong guidance from Donald Davie on the point, simply misunderstands a poem by Amis (pages 79-80). It’s coming to something when these apostles of the new lucidity, proponents of the view that the poet must do his share and not leave the reader to work out his obscure half-written ...”

“... operandi. When he reaches a tricky impasse in a conversation, his way out is to make a job offer. Lindsay Graham, the Republican senator, came to see him to explain that the Afghan war was unwinnable. ‘“We’re going to fail on the political,” [Graham] said. A peace settlement with the Taliban was the only way out … Trump had a solution. Did Graham ...”

“... the Fortune Theatre), The Changing Room and Home; effortless they seemed to be, particularly under Lindsay Anderson’s direction. I met Gielgud when he was rehearsing Home, in which he starred with Ralph Richardson, and he sang David’s praises. ‘He’s the ideal playwright. Never says a word.’5 May. Angels in America opens at the National. When I saw ...”