Search Results

“... In 1679 a small book with the resonant title Order and Disorder; or, the world made and undone was published in London. The title was intended to touch a nerve. The Restoration crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds ...”

“... For his half-niece Anne Wharton, writing immediately after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes ...”

“... including the massive ones of architecture and gardening, minor arts.’ With this one sentence Germaine Greer provokes several queries and a vehement expostulation. What is ‘prestigiousness’ and how does it differ from the prestige in the earlier part of the sentence? Why single out portable paintings, a class that includes not only easel pictures ...”

“... a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at Warwick, where she was a colleague of Germaine Greer, and the author of a subtle and distinguished book of criticism called Transformations of Allegory. She was also a poet, who passionately wanted to be a poet, and to combine it with being a perfect teacher, researcher, lover, mother, perhaps ...”

“... Germaine Greer has three main propositions to advance in her new book. These are, first, that genital, recreational sex is overvalued in our culture. Second, that birth-control programmes in the Third World are unnecessary, ineffectual and cruel. Third, that families which stress the procreative relationship are preferable to those which stress the conjugal relationship ...”

“... rail. In retrospect, you could argue this was a more apposite image than the artist intended. Greer’s women seem often to lack a head and its contents, not just other body parts. But at the time, the book grabbed with its brilliance. There were those brief, cumulatively hard-hitting chapters, and the irreverent, punchy writing style honed in underground ...”

“... soiling the carpet. No matter what taboos you kick out at, people just smile and shake their head. Germaine Greer has become a licensed controversialist, which is a pity because we ought to have someone in our ageing generation who still has the capacity to really piss people off. But look, here we are in the grip of the most virulent antipathy to the ...”

“... died in 1979; Sonia Orwell, George Orwell’s widow, a year later. Mr Plante’s third subject is Germaine Greer, who, as well as being a friend with a house near his in Italy, was his colleague for a term at the University of Tulsa (‘from Tulsa I wrote letters to Sonia, one long one about Germaine Greer’). Of ...”

“... This is an interesting, infuriating, brilliant, maddening book. In short, it is a work by Germaine Greer, who prefers (or so one sometimes thinks) anything to stagnation. The title is taken from Pope, whose Virgilian Sibyl in the Dunciad is the modern female British poet as satire liked to see her. Possessed by the muse or Apollo though they claim to be, women as poets are untidy, slovenly, careless of housekeeping ...”

“... her curiosity and her love. The question presents itself: how much space is there really between a Greer book about her father and the next slab of, say, Maclaine or Taylor, Going Public on some hitherto neglected item of spiritual or carnal adventure? Less, it seems at times, than one might have hoped. Not so much because of the writer’s freedom to fly ...”

“... of course, but not nearly as much of one as I would like it to be. I am the same age as Germaine Greer and therefore in much the same relation to the subject of her new book, The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause,* as I was to The Female Eunuch. It’s my story. At least that’s how I see it. (‘Oh God,’ my ex-husband said when I told ...”

“... to Medieval chronicles, must have actually killed some men in battle. On the dust-wrapper, Germaine Greer tells us this is ‘the most shocking book any feminist has yet written’, and Shere Hite praises it as ‘ground-breaking, outstanding, original, and an act of forbidden rebellion’. I can’t understand why Dworkin’s rediscovery of the ...”

“... In​ 1971 Germaine Greer hosted two episodes of the Dick Cavett Show on American television. How she moved from being a guest on the programme while she was promoting The Female Eunuch to being its stand-in presenter isn’t clear (the suspicion is that the ABC network thought ‘the saucy feminist that even men like’ – in the words of Life magazine – would be a useful weapon in the ratings wars ...”

“... Agendas, and Cora Kaplan’s collection from a ten-year period has just appeared in Sea Changes. Germaine Greer’s Madwoman’s Underclothes, designed, according to the dust-jacket, to demonstrate ‘what a force in our cultural life she is’, covers a much longer stretch of past time, from 1968 to 1985, starting with a piece from Oz and ending with a ...”

“... developed smoothly enough from their media involvement at the time – Richard Neville himself, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Charles Shaar Murray. Some people died, but only the famously talented (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison) stick in the public memory. Most of the freaks, hippies and radicals recognised that youth was just a holiday, and come the end ...”