Search Results

“... tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme/But Money gives me pleasure all the time.’) As Joseph Pearce tells in Old Thunder, he was already fretting over his increasingly lightweight reputation for comic verse and was pursuing ‘meatier material’. He had under his belt The Modern Traveller, that splendid satire on African exploration ...”

“... among the more obviously tangential literary observers of this century. Kafka, for example – as Pearce reminds us – read The Man Who Was Thursday, and another admirer was Borges. I remember having a conversation with the great Argentinian about The Man Who Was Thursday during the Falklands War and it seemed appropriate to be discussing a book in which two ...”

“... enough people to be given hagiographic treatments in the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and Joseph Pearce. More critical studies by Ian Ker and William Oddie have emphasised the links between a life spent joyfully giving no thought to the morrow and the apologetic books, which argue that only Christian belief can supply a maximum of wonder at this ...”

“... of the easily available material comes from Tolkien’s own publisher. Shippey’s books, like Joseph Pearce’s Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998), are published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, which has published the Tolkien oeuvre since taking over Allen and Unwin in 1990. Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 authorised biography and his 1981 edition of the ...”

“... if they could scratch a living where they were. The defining ancestor seems to have been Joseph Noble, an aggressive Scotch-Irishman and Max’s maternal grandfather: unlike Max a fierce drinker, but one whose flair bought up most of Maple, Ontario. Before his 32nd birthday in 1911, Max Aitken’s flair had brought him a knighthood to add to ...”

“... and architect George Dance, who drew him in profile in 1794 in what another friend, the painter Joseph Farington, described as ‘a very strong likeness’. Taylor is shown in profile, wearing his own hair arranged in a long pigtail and a curious frizzy headphone which covers his ear. He has a short concave forehead, a long straight nose, a round, prominent ...”

“... bird. There are stories, also, which seem to emanate from ‘Beachcomber’, like that of Joseph Furtenbach, a mathematician of Ulm (and obvious ancestor of Dr Strabismus of Utrecht) who, in order to prove that the ‘Earth rotates, fired a cannon vertically and then sat on the mouth of the weapon (what this has to do with the weather is not ...”

“... not necessarily prime ministers, from Gladstone to Thatcher. The Grand Old Man himself, Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Asquith and Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain and Churchill have chapters to themselves, followed by one on Keynes, and a third section which deals essentially with the historical background to the two principal parties of the present ...”

“... and a significant minority is extremely sceptical. Probably the best overview was given by Fred Pearce in New Scientist last year: ‘We are unlikely to give up burning coal any time soon, and CCS’ – carbon capture and storage – ‘could eventually have an important part to play by allowing coal to be used without doing unacceptable damage to the ...”

“... Swann Committee of Inquiry into the education of ethnic minority groups is attacked by Simon Pearce for reflecting ‘the anti-racist doctrine that disparate levels of educational achievement between ethnic groups are proof positive of discrimination,’ and for being ‘basically illiberal’; its ‘moral base’, he says, ‘throbs with all the ugly ...”

“... that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post at the office did not reveal much of ...”

“... he died. Only one thing rescued Fitzgerald’s name from a dismal place between Floyd Dell and Joseph Hergesheimer on the list of forgotten novelists of the 1920s – the novel Perkins called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to ...”

“... on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American ...”