Search Results

“... Second World War; purchases resumed in 1941, in New York, with André Breton, Howard Putzel and Max Ernst also advising. The catalogue of Guggenheim’s collection, Art of This Century, published in that year, amounted to an ‘anthology of modern art’ – that is, a sourcebook of approved models of thirty years of European avant-garde art. At the end of ...”

“... the way to achieving his childhood dream of becoming the greatest aviator since Orville and Wilbur Wright. But he hesitated. He had been reading Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in his spare time, and believed that their inquiries into the foundations of logic heralded a revolution even more exciting than the invention of powered flight. He wanted to be part ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression ...”

“... my highly polished cranium’. At the Brescia Air Show in September 1909 – six years after the Wright Brothers’ first lift-off – d’Annunzio recited a poem about Icarus to a crowd estimated at fifty thousand. Among those present was Kafka, holidaying with his friend Max Brod on Lake Garda. Brod thought d’Annunzio ...”

“... the age of 38 of Spanish influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger than life, as the avant-garde spirit incarnate, and if his long poems, like those of Whitman and O’Hara, seem to expand and prolong themselves as effortlessly as amoebas in a petri dish, then beneath the ...”

“... the relentless observation and quantification of British academics.Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Wendy Brown gave at Yale in 2019. As she acknowledges, Weber is, on the face of it, a surprising choice of ally for a radical political thinker who has done so much to ...”

“... on race, designed to defuse the rapidly escalating row about the behaviour of his pastor, the Rev. Wright, he fires back a one-line response: ‘This is why you should be president.’ Another of his staffers, Anita Dunn, recalls thinking at the same time: ‘This is a guy I want in a foxhole with me.’ The one respect in which Obama comes across as ...”

“... black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on James Baldwin’s prophetic language – are ...”