Search Results

“... The Hazlitt of our time’, said the Manchester Guardian, announcing the death of James Agate in 1947. An extravagant compliment, but the famous theatre reviewer did have one or two of Hazlitt’s characteristics. Though his journalism now seems too pompous-frivolous even for the theatre world, his reports of actors’ performances are often vivid and persuasive: he was quite learned in his subject and could communicate his own enthusiasm, making drama seem important – more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today ...”

“... Review in the 1960s. She liked to put writers in their place – Ezra Pound’s Kensington and James Joyce’s Dublin – and in Metato quickly found a priest who gave her a vivid sense of the camp in Pound’s day: electrified fences, ‘gibbet-like posts’, barbed wire, pup tents and towers with armed guards. ‘Nothing remained of the DTC,’ she ...”

“... just a touch, her left leg braced under a sidling hip.The celebrity appearances by Adam and Saints James, John (Evangelist) and Peter take the form of little soul-flames, like the others, distinguished only by the tags inscribed beside them. The couple converse and pass on. We see the last of them as they rise through the river of light (Canto xxx). Beatrice ...”

“... In his preface​ to the new edition of My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket remembers being in the room with George W. Bush when he was told that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Bush was reading to a group of schoolchildren in Florida and Plunket, then a journalist on the Sarasota Magazine, was part of the press corps ...”

“... and any phone call we make, is potentially being analysed by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history wasn’t any of this: it wasn’t a piece of news at all. It was the 12-minute video, made by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, in which Snowden explained who ...”

“... failing country of the 1950s and 1960s’ was ‘propped up … by the monarchy, the Beatles and James Bond’. You may not like the wall-to-wall assertion of decline, but Winder is proposing what he calls ‘an entertainment’ involving ‘British themes’, not a history. A more ‘entertaining’ tour of 007, and the period associations that get sucked ...”

“... against pessimism he is sceptical about massive geo-engineering schemes of the kind put forward by James Lovelock and the eccentric Stewart Brand. Can-do projects on a grand scale have been dreamed up before: draining the Mediterranean into the Sahara, for instance, or diverting warm Pacific water into the Arctic Sea and turning Siberia into a vast ...”

“... the great Ellington protégé, was living there – presumably composing – in the 1990s. James Schuyler arrived in 1979 and wrote out his last years there. The Chelsea’s presiding spirit in the 19th century was Philip Gengembre Hubert, the son of a French Fourierist who took him to America as the New World phalansteries were breaking up. Hubert, a ...”

“... Biafra through Kissinger in South Africa (HK to Vorster: ‘I’m only here for De Beers’) via James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, to Mugabe, Bush and Blair. For fans of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the ...”

“... conundrums of Tate Britishness. She is looking at the same tangle of questions explored by Jeremy Harding in his essay ‘Europe at Bay’ in the LRB of 9 February. Coming at the politics of migration via the experience of an Afghan refugee waiting to enter Britain, Harding also took us through its philosophical ...”

“... says in his foreword, anything can happen and anything and everything does. My Search for Warren Harding, Mr Plunket’s first novel, is described on the jacket as ‘The Aspern Papers somehow performed by the Brothers Marx’. The bones of the plot do come from the same Henry James novella currently on view as a play at ...”

“... father, wrongly, claims his great-granddaddy was). In the unrevised version, an elderly Senator, James Burden Day, a recurring character, is surprised to discover himself still capable of arousal: ‘at a time when he thought himself altogether free of the demands of the flesh, he had become like a boy again, or almost.’ In the rewritten version, ‘it ...”

“... wouldn’t have known what an ash tree looked like but I knew that such a thing existed from M.R. James. ‘The Ash Tree’ is a sinister tale, set at the end of the Restoration, about a woman found cutting twigs from an ash tree, tried as a witch, hanged and buried: she migrates back to the veteran specimen of fraxinus excelsior on the land of the squire who ...”

“... 1926. A large part of the problem was Moore’s summary dismissal of contemporaries such as Hardy, James and Conrad. Jealous of his literary fame, Moore was aptly described by Joseph Hone as ‘the least catholic of critics’. It is easy to underestimate how unpleasant it could be to meet so eccentric and belligerent a figure as Mr Moore. His compulsion to ...”

“... occurs’. His schoolfriends – Philip, a conscientious plodder; Doug, a worldly left-wing wit; Harding, an anarchic practical joker; and Steve, an athlete and the only black pupil – are more enterprising, as are their counterparts from the girls’ school over the road. Benjamin spends most of the novel mooning over the needy but beautiful Cicely and not ...”