Search Results

“... still I think he was more right than wrong.) ‘Death joins us to the great majority,’ Droned Edward Young. No quarrel there from me. ‘Age,’ Bacon burbled, ‘will not be defied.’ A boring thought that will not be denied, For fatalism, even as a platitude, Remains the only reasonable attitude, While if compounded with inventive verve Its ...”

“... is traditionally Muslim and Egyptian and what is Western and modern. In one story, for example, a young peasant boy becomes an apprentice in an Alexandria hairdressing salon for women; there he discovers that while washing the women’s hair he experiences a passionate sexual arousal and this in turn sets him up in the story’s last scene for a terrifying ...”

“... the flower of past kings; the form of future kings; a merciful king; the peace of his peoples; Edward III, completing the jubilee of his reign; an unconquered leopard; victorious in battle like a Maccabee . . . he ruled mighty in arms; now in heaven let him be a king. So (in translation) run the verses around the tomb of ...”

“... In 1935, Edward James, English and very rich, entered into an agreement to purchase from Salvador Dali his most important works. It was a funny sort of agreement, but it lasted until 1939 and during that period James acquired a large number of Dali’s Surrealist works, including the telephone with a lobster replacing the receiver, two of the sofas which represent Mae West’s lips, and the painting Autumn Cannibalism, depicting two ‘Iberian beings’ eating one another with the help of spoon and fork and, according to the painter, expressing the pathos of civil war ...”

“... thought it prudent to visit Lebanon since the spring of 1982, although my wife Mariam and two young children have made a couple of visits since the Israeli invasion. My widowed mother valiantly hangs on all alone in her West Beirut house, quite sensibly focused on the problems of her health, the failures of electricity and telephone service, the ...”

“... do now ‘but fumble in a greasy till’. Was it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet ...”

“... the argument, as if it is meant to be emphatic, but which by itself seems hardly worth saying. ‘Young people appear then to have been more promiscuous... than married adults.’ Even allowing for all kinds of cultural change, that seems always likely to have been (on average) true. So what is this book trying to tell us? That some things never ...”

“... In Modern British politics, Edward Heath is the Old Man of the Sea. Not quite as ancient as Methuselah, he has been around for five active decades which sometimes seem like a century. The ocean was what famously passed for his recreational hinterland, and the jacket of his autobiography shows an open, smiling face which could be that of a tweedy amateur sea-dog, weather-beaten and gimlet-eyed, and is, at a guess, at least ten years behind the corpulent, irritable landlubber who now rolls with some difficulty round the House of Commons ...”

“... on 14 October 1066. It is the final event that has dominated the public imagination. Since Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), ‘last of’ has been almost obligatory in book titles, picked up by Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake, Last of the English (1866), and continued more recently in Hebe Weenolsen’s The ...”

“... and current affairs, and bitingly critical of Peel. This brings him to the attention of a group of young and wealthy backbench Tories who want a high-profile leader for their campaign against Peel’s ‘Conservatives’, and Peel is duly destroyed. Deserted by the majority of Tory MPs, he’s forced to resign and dies a few years later as the result of a ...”

“... its operations, its requirement of originality – ‘Originals can arise from genius only,’ as Edward Young alleged – did make a difference to writers, who might well feel frightened into impotence by the appalling demands of genius and sublimity. Reminding us of the Romantic habit of leaving things unfinished, or writing other pieces to avoid ...”

“... pastoral ‘Rills’) which not only Pope in Peri Bathous but also Hill himself, annotating Edward Young’s Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1719), identified as the stylistic traps lying in wait for prospective exponents of the sublime. Neither The Creation nor The Judgment Day (or, for that matter, any other poem by Hill) features in the excellent ...”

“... It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness – he calculated he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day ...”

“... in mainland Europe which followed the end of the Council of Trent in 1563, unlike many young Englishmen of restless spirit and Catholic inclinations.The Somerset House picture is still only half William Byrd. If McCarthy’s publishers had budgeted for a back-cover image, I would have recommended an empty lawn on the fringes of North London: the ...”

“... me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or more exactly to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward’, a foolishly English name yoked to the unmistakably Arabic family name ‘Said’. True, ‘Edward’ was for the Prince of Wales who cut so fine a figure in 1935, the year of my birth, and ‘Said’ was the name of ...”