Search Results

“... as the myriad of other devices which bolster the black economy. As the book by Arnold Heertje, Margaret Allen and Harry Cohen shows, this problem is huge. According to some estimates, it accounts for 15 per cent of the gross national product. It embraces tax evasion, business expense fiddles, moonlighting, golden handshakes – and social security ...”

“... limitations of the structure are always in evidence. There is no doubt at all about the Canadian Margaret Atwood’s being a novelist. Both Lady Oracle (first published in 1976 and now appearing in paperback) and Bodily Harm are splendid demonstrations of the contemporary novelist’s craft. To read them together is to note an interesting complementarity ...”

“... Head Orgasm. Two years later, a ‘practising medical herbalist’ called Jennifer Allen started a Facebook group in which she proposed a name that stuck: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR. A transcript of these discussions is printed across one wall of Weird Sensation Feels Good at the Design Museum, an exhibition dedicated ...”

“... Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, All Said and Done and Adieux: A farewell to Sartre. Crosscheck against the documentary scripts, the recorded ...”

“... Lefèvre d’Etaples’s Biblical studies won him the support of the French King’s sister, Margaret, and ought to have made him a natural ally of Erasmus. He was soon at Erasmus’s throat. I ‘treat Christ with contumely’, Erasmus exploded. He picked over Lefèvre’s worst insults in a letter addressed to Guillaume Budé (who had the ear of the ...”

“... smallholding family from the ‘rain-soaked’ ‘raw-bone’ laws – the high moors around Allen-heads in Northumberland. They are two poor kids growing up in the late Fifties. She wears a ‘Co-op coat’; the boy-poet’s heart is            ransomed to Pearl, her Woolworth butterfly blue plastic clip, still ...”

“... really lecherous they would no longer be funny. (Adam Gopnik was making such a point about Woody Allen a couple of months ago in the New Yorker.) Being parodies of lechery, they enact claims on the part of each human creature (‘All God’s chillun’ is how they name them in A Day at the Races) to be loved, for no reason. Harpo would not know what to do if ...”

“... A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into English. Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate ...”

“... workings of ‘fate’. The book begins in 1931, with a description of Weldon’s pregnant mother, Margaret, then aged 23, running through Napier, New Zealand, carrying her first daughter in her arms, as an earthquake destroys the town around her. She reaches safety but cannot find her husband, a doctor: perhaps he was buried among the rubble while tending the ...”

“... Communist Party allegedly referred to such techniques as hsi nao, ‘washing the brain’.In 1951, Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer, was appointed the CIA’s deputy director for plans. Dulles, who was convinced that the future would belong to the world power that could master the new ‘brainwashing’ technologies, was instrumental in shifting the ...”

“... is not for him to decide what will happen to him.’ Equally characteristic is his response when Allen Ginsberg began to sing him his musical settings of Blake: ‘Won’t you please stop? Hearing people sing songs they’ve composed embarrasses me terribly. I can’t bear it.’ Spender of course listened to the songs, which were not painful and sounded ...”

“... Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 ...”

“... partially superseded until our own day: the correspondence by the great edition of P.S. and H.M. Allen, completed by H.W. Garrod (1906-58) and now many other works by the quincentenary Amsterdam edition, of which the first instalment appeared in 1969. The correspondence is available in French translation from Brussels (1967-84); a large selection of works in ...”

“... priorities on the part of public broadcasters and, according to some, strong pressure from Margaret Thatcher, who was determined to help Rupert Murdoch build up his television empire. Within a few years there was no live cricket left on terrestrial television. Numerous addicts, myself included, were forced to admit defeat, sign the document of ...”

“... and William Carlos Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in 1910 bestowed on Pound an annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the ...”