Search Results

“... evening meals of the lonely souls of Sitka, she has prepared several dozen slices of pickled crab apple on lettuce leaves. She tricks out Landsman’s dinner with one of these corsages.’ And then there are the metaphors. The Verbover rabbi’s breasts are ‘full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple’. A teabag is dunked in a ...”

“... But did Hastings anticipate the competition from his own tribe, from the tech giants Amazon and Apple, which have cash on tap, and for which a billion is a basic accounting unit? These behemoths’ streamers, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+, are happy to make dozens of meh shows while they wait for one or two to be a ...”

“... the compellingly repulsive head of Slough House, for the television adaptation, which has been on Apple TV+ since last year (two books down, six and counting to go). Alec Guinness inhabited the role of Smiley so completely in the 1970s BBC version of Tinker Tailor and its sequel that it’s always slightly surprising (to me, anyway) when le Carré’s novels ...”

“... but unexplained; this play with a revealing-that-conceals is everywhere in Magritte. Of the apple that blocks the face of the bowler-hatted man in The Great War (1964), he commented: ‘Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see … The interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of ...”

“... not a vampire.’Is there a guiding philosophy that connects this bewildering range of activities? Max Chafkin looks for one in his new account of Thiel’s life and career, but to be honest he doesn’t look very hard. Instead, he does an excellent job of unpicking the disparate elements of the Thiel mythology. Nothing is quite what it seems. Take Thiel’s ...”

“... the particular weirdness of the Cézanne world: a piece of fruit that is a ‘non-pear [and] non-apple’, a surface in one of The Card Players paintings that is a ‘non-wall and non-window’, folds of cloth that are ‘liable to take on a life of their own’, landscapes that somehow get ‘familiarity and unfamiliarity, nearness and apartness’ to ...”

“... Testimonial Fund raised the equivalent of quarter of a million of our contemporary pounds, Max Beerbohm drew what was for him an unusually mordant cartoon, in which (I quote from Rae) a ‘huge Grace with bulging biceps stands in the foreground with a minuscule cricket bat in one hand and a large cheque in the other, while behind him the funeral ...”

“... it analysed as loss. The Salvation Army does, so to speak, a great job, even if Eve never bit an apple in her life. Undoubtedly the most valuable part of Francis Mulhern’s book is its conscientious cataloguing and listing. He describes very well, for instance, the struggles and infighting attendant upon the founding of the English School at Cambridge just ...”

“... The origins of this worldly modernity can be found in the events of 1391 and not – as works like Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism would have it – in the Reformation. Marranism provides the best genealogy for our ‘modern selves’, one that makes sense both of our early modern origins and our postmodern ends. Despite the ...”

“... a garret, many of them might as well have done. In the 1890s, when the ‘new woman’ sprang, as Max Beerbohm put it, ‘fully armed from Ibsen’s brain’, their cases tended to follow a pattern. Attracted by the idea of freedom from social and sexual convention and the chance to live among artists, even to be artists, they found themselves not in a new ...”

“... 1888 turned his mother into a morphine addict; that his father was a touring matinée idol and the apple of his own beady immigrant Irish eye; that he’d been sent away to a Catholic boarding school at seven; and, after all the other bruising losses of his peripatetic childhood, managed to lose his faith too, and you have a connoisseur of ...”

“... from a distance, perhaps at a reading, the last place you’d imagine him to be from would be an apple and cherry farm in western New York State, hard by the shores of Lake Ontario. He was rather patrician in bearing and had beautiful manners, soft-spoken, with a droll, sometimes wicked sense of humour: he would seem at home at all the vernissages and salons ...”

“... of Chico, whom they had long since written off. Harpo, wearing a fruit-covered hat, plucked an apple and an orange, Chico dodged and hurled them back, somebody lowered the curtain and the three Marx Brothers were four. Show business is full of incongruities. Gummo, drafted into the Army and told by Minnie that they could do without him, would withdraw ...”

“... everything from carpentry to glassblowing to calculation. At his wits’ end, he left a poisoned apple on Blackett’s desk. What could have been a nasty incident turned out to be a narrow escape. His father, in town on a visit, worked out a deal with the dean. Instead of being sent down (or sent to prison), Oppenheimer was sent to an analyst. Apparently ...”

“... the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man,’ Hughes wrote in a rollicking review of Max Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution in 1970: ‘Our Civilisation is an evolutionary error.’ It’s a sorry story of decline, but the temper of Hughes’s poems is rarely elegiac: nature puts up a good fight. It’s not surprising to learn that Hughes ...”