Search Results

“... few​ significant American poets called as little attention to themselves in their lifetimes as Michael O’Brien, who died last November at the age of 77. Much as with Lorine Niedecker – whose ‘silences’, he wrote, ‘derive from an intellectual conviction that art, like science, demands total concentration on the object of attention’ – his ...”

“... history of the antebellum South, much less become a historian of Southern intellectuals? Michael O’Brien has been working on an answer to these questions for fifteen years, and the result is a massive refutation of received wisdom. His first task is to persuade a sceptical audience of the mere existence of Southern intellectual life between ...”

“... that includes five poems by Hagiwara. Howling at the Moon was dedicated to the brilliant poet Michael O’Brien, a New Yorker, as Sato has now been for many years, whose own poetry reflects the influence of the Japanese sensibility, especially in its delicacy and attention to small detail. Sato sees himself as a translator, not a poet, even though ...”

“... Hawthorne. No circle in the South could match that intellectual array. Nevertheless, along with Michael O’Brien, Genovese has successfully revived interest in Southern antebellum thinkers whose obscurity, they claim, is unmerited. The Southern Tradition reaffirms his long-standing devotion to the pro-slavery thinkers but takes still greater delight ...”

“... There are​ few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers to share his acts of seeing. In his new book, Angel Hill (Cape, £10), even a cataract operation is an opportunity to celebrate sharpness of vision: ‘My eyeball’s frozen ...”

“... According to one early theory, the reason some of the murder sites were close to branches of Michael’s, the craft-store chain, was that the shooter wished to be thought of as the Archangel Michael, expecting the cowed populace to recall the name’s meaning (‘who is like God’) and to realise the end was nigh. The ...”

“... slanted towards the book’s central preoccupation with explaining a slaveholding worldview. Like Michael O’Brien, in his Conjectures of Order (2004), the Genoveses are exasperated with the tendency of historians to dismiss Southerners as anti-intellectual, provincial or crassly materialistic. Unlike O’Brien, they ...”

“... their media-men (like most British media-men) lean towards the SDP and they point to the fact that Michael Foot’s huge overflow meeting attracted less press wonder and applause than Shirley Williams’s. But to a Londoner, these local papers seem pretty fair and accurate – stating but not overstating the obvious fact, recognised by the Telegraph papers in ...”

“... mistake. The person who collects the narratives and puts together Lancaster’s career is Edmond O’Brien, an insurance agent investigating the death because of its implications for a policy Lancaster had. O’Brien’s interest, and ours, goes way beyond any professional insurance need, and it is intriguing that both ...”

“... the backslidings. Hypocrisy waits at every intersection. But it remains the fact that Conor Cruise O’Brien has been one of the great stylists of our time, whether writing about France, Britain, Ireland or Africa. It further remains a fact that his has been a voice attuned to the discourse of reason, and that when he has been ‘mobbish’ (his own preferred ...”

“... Atypical​ Edna O’Brien story begins on a square of green. A stone farmhouse looms behind, with a slick spot on the flagstones where the same tin can is emptied every morning by the hired man. Pigs are somewhere in the mix, as are sheep and cows. Around and above and within the green floats another colour, that of deep velvet, the sacred heart, a dog’s tongue ...”

“... adds up to something less than our old imagined intimacy. We knew them better before we knew them.Michael Ragussis says this scene is ‘the exact opposite’ of an apocalypse. ‘The poet is not exalted through vision. He escapes nothing except falsehood.’ I agree there is no exaltation here, but there is surely some sort of apocalypse – a ...”

“... returned from a savage encounter with daylight. At London’s Duchess Theatre one night, Edna O’Brien and I climbed a million steps to the dressing rooms to congratulate Mark Rylance and his co-star on their performances in Beckett’s Endgame. It was a thankless journey. Rylance had no booze, and his co-star, still smarting from the review in the ...”

“... began by showing the importance of Burke to the Left and the lessons he has to offer. Conor Cruise O’Brien has examined Burke’s relationship to revolution in several papers which offer fascinating fore-tastes of the biography he has in the making: among other points he has established significant common ground between Burke and Marx. Mr ...”

“... in the Eighties. He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor Cruise O’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and anger over, say, Bernard Levin – Britain’s answer ...”