Search Results

“... The age of flight​ had barely begun in 1914 – the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903 – but it had developed swiftly. The Wrights’ airplane – in the shape of a big box kite, made of spruce and muslin – flew at a speed of about seven miles an hour, not much faster than a man walking briskly beside it. By 1908 an improved version went forty miles an hour, and a year after that Blériot, in a plane of his own design, flew across the English Channel ...”

“... In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s. They talk of the excitement of flying, and Faulkner drunkenly reminisces about his days as a pilot in France during the First World War ...”

“... It isn’t Salter’s language alone that numbers him among the masters, but it is what strikes you first. From Light Years of 1975: ‘On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat ...”

“... the mountains. The mindlessness, the taciturnity, the dedication to physical achievement, take James Salter perilously close to the Hemingway bad lands, even within hailing distance of Clint Eastwood: but not, I think, over the edge. The treatment of Rand and his exploits is quite free from the bar-room knowingness, the sentimentality and the sadism ...”

“... menagerie at Chelsea. But generous trust could easily be satirised as simple-minded credulity. James Salter, a fellow Ulsterman and one-time servant of Sloane, put objects such as ‘Pontius Pilate’s Wife’s Chambermaid’s Sister’s Hat’, allegedly acquired from his former master, on show at a coffee house in Cheyne Walk. It was thanks to ...”

“... natural casting as a failure. He is a classic writer, in the old Esquire tradition, a lesser James Salter, and a dedicated ladies’ man. Specktor’s chapter on him turns into a synopsis for a screwball movie with its account of the filming of what became 92 in the Shade (1975).McGuane and his first wife, Becky, lived in glamorously wild places ...”

“... he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter pilot. He made me think of James Salter and his code of taciturn manliness.But then you meet another witness who explains the big gap between ordering the death of your enemy from 15,000 feet and being in the dark in a Viet Cong tunnel. This is ...”

“... see the tragic Hardy, the ideological Hardy, in better perspective. This is also the aim of C.H. Salter’s Good Little Thomas Hardy – but fulfilled in a very different spirit. The offensive title of this book is taken from a letter of Henry James. What right had James to patronise ...”

“... the buildings and most of the planting were the doing of Bermondsey’s mayor in the 1920s, Ada Salter, and her husband, Alfred, first a GP in the area and then its MP.Dr Salter is remembered by a sculpture near the riverfront, Ada in the name of a garden and an initiative inspired by her insistence on the right of all to ...”

“... On 26 September​ 1849 the lord mayor of London, Sir James Duke, laid the foundation stone for the new City House of Correction at Holloway. The land had been intended for use as a burial ground for victims of the recent cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ‘May God preserve the City of London/And make this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation stone read ...”

“... through consumption and a white, white Christmas: even if you’ve never read Yates or Cheever or Salter, generations of cinematic art, from Hitchcock to Lynch, have prepared you for the nastiness below the surface of stuff like this. You assume there’s a dark underbelly, and there is. Betty is on her second marriage. She broke with her previous ...”