Search Results

“... In the early Eighties, Western governments, notably those of America, Britain and France, were anxious to assess the probable rate of growth and pathways of infection of Aids. They sponsored extensive sex surveys in order to find out, for example, the number of sexual partners an average male had in his lifetime and how many used safe sex. The British survey was carried out by four women, primarily trained in medical statistics, epidemiology and health care ...”

“... In Michael Korda’s Curtain a thinly disguised Laurence Olivier puts at risk his marriage to a thinly disguised Vivien Leigh by having an affair with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) a no less thinly disguised Danny Kaye. Well! Well? As a piece of writing, the novel is aimed with charming accuracy at the station bookstall trade, where it should thrive ...”

“... Michael​ Neve died on 9 October. I first met him in 1995, at a funeral. We had been taught Nietzsche by the same lecturer at Cambridge; that had been enough academia for me, but Michael had advanced (or, by his own account, stumbled haplessly) to the position of senior lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL ...”

“... the dead and win a new following of thrill-starved souls in thrall to his dark magic’. That was Michael Gove; the idea that a man who admires Wheatley is now in charge of the nation’s schools is more genuinely terrifying than anything Wheatley ever ...”

“... of a scholarly conspiracy, hinted at in the text, has recently been trumpeted by the journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which is largely a popularisation of Robert Eisenman’s theories. Unsurprisingly, Baigent and Leigh contribute an effusive blurb to this book. Eisenman for ...”

“... delicate passages: as with Mayakovsky, they are mostly about animals. In a poem called ‘Lines to Robert Lowell’, for instance, there are these lines on Arthur Miller’s dog Hugo: You’re not a dachshund, you’re a slipper, a moccasin with a gaping sole, shabby with use. A certain Unknown Being puts you on his left foot and shuffles across the ...”

“... Certainly it doesn’t appear in the striking list of words for mad states reproduced in Michael Macdonald’s Mystical Bedlam, a study of 17th-century English sources. Instead we have ‘mad’, ‘lunatic’, ‘melancholy’, ‘stubborn’, ‘suspicious’, ‘fancies and conceits’, ‘frightening dreams’. This disappearance of the Classical ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... IOur stars on either side – herb robert, tormentil –The reeds we walk between are lovers whispering.IIThey shelter with us behind the drystone wall,The men who laid these grass-smothered boulders.IIIIn the far field a jackass and his jennetSafeguard the mare and her dozing foal.IVButterfly-orchid ghosts, sand-martin ghostsWhere the Owenadornaun used to flow ...”

“... In the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to the perils of religious enthusiasm, Robert Burton pauses briefly to comment on the complex and meritorious rituals of the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca: their fastings, their running till they sweat, their long prayers, Mahomets temple, tombe, and building of it, would aske a whole volume to dilate: and for their paines taken in this holy pilgrimage, all their sins are forgiven, and they are reputed so many saints ...”

“... Then morning comes, saying: ‘This was a night.’ Robert Lowell Broken knights. – No, not like that. Well, no matter. Something agreeably Tennysonian (is there Any other kind?) About ‘broken knights’. Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere. In my one-piece pyjamas – My it doesn’t matter suit, With necessarily non-matching – Matchless, makeless, makeles – Added top, I pad Downstairs to look At the green time On the digital microwave ...”

“... Suddenly I thought: ‘My God, he’s going to speak to me!’ ‘Am I right in thinking you’re Robert Melville?’ he said. ‘My name is Clark.’ ‘Indisputably, Sir Kenneth,’ I answered. I remember the word I used, because as soon as I said it I realised that it was ludicrously inappropriate. And I went on quickly: ‘It’s a fine Pasmore, isn’t ...”

“... We do get some proper dates as we go along. Sibil was born in 1971; she met her future husband, Robert, when she was 16. We never find out when they got married, but we do know that they opened a clothes store in Shreveport, Louisiana; that they ran out of money when an investor pulled out of the business; and that they decided to solve their problems by ...”

“... Summer For months the heat of love has kept me marching Robert Lowell I snap my boy’s bow in the morning, wash his stiffy at night, blow my brains out with music, anything from ‘Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit’ to ‘Sexual Healing’. Je te veux. The vaunted sod under my feet is rolled up like a piece of turf or a blanket in my grenadier’s knapsack, along with a toothbrush and near-pristine candle end ...”

“... included verse in Middle English, Latin, Old French and Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and ...”