Search Results

“... Ilya Ehrenburg had a complaint about his friend Pablo Neruda’s work. ‘Too much root,’ he said. ‘Too many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this remark in his memoirs, took it as a joke, which it probably was, and as a compliment, which it probably wasn’t. Isla Negra has a whole section, originally a separate volume, called ‘The Hunter after Roots’, and Neruda is not the sort of poet who hunts for things he can’t find, or indeed for things he hasn’t already found ...”

“... in the style which I originated, for years, when no works at all resembled mine but my own.’ Martin Hardie has defined that originality as an assumption of new technical licences. ‘The central tradition of watercolour meant nothing to Rossetti,’ Hardie observes. ‘He started out to hack his way to ...”

“... of the Labour movement. The most significant pioneer of independent Labour representation, Keir Hardie, was a miner, yet the mining MPs (sitting as Liberals) held aloof from the Labour Representation Committee founded in 1900, till their accession in 1906 enabled that fledgling political organisation to change its name to Labour Party. Today’s leader is a ...”

“... defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of computer-generated ...”