Search Results

“... George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were others) bedazzled by the ghoulish Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple cult, Elvis-style drug addict, ambisexual pussy-predator, and self-anointed ‘revolutionary socialist’ who in 1978 subsequently persuaded 900 or so of his followers, mostly poor ...”

“... last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is ...”

“... exhortations, it cannot avoid falling prey to a certain didactic utility itself, just as Tom Jones tries paradoxically to teach us that virtue is for the most part spontaneous. Eighteenth-century satirists like Swift and Fielding commonly operate a kind of double optic, using some unworldly innocent to lay bare human degeneracy while deploying the fact ...”

“... post-Newmanite Oxford to encounter Ruskin and (in the form of his lifelong colleague Edward Burne-Jones) Pre-Raphaelitism. After Oxford, he and his friends set up an arts and crafts workshop in Red Lion Square and helped to paint the Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, while Morris himself unleashed an unstaunchable stream of poetry. He then removed himself ...”

“... South Koreans who went for his ankles in the 1986 World Cup. In the quarter-final against England, Terry Butcher sliced him down after he’d outpaced five England players to score the ‘Goal of the Century’. No doubt Butcher couldn’t help it, though twenty and even thirty years later he was still talking about wanting to punch or throttle Maradona for ...”

“... traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then ...”

“... gang had to leave the site and return the next day with a new pump. One of the gang members, Danny Jones, bought the new machine: he signed for it as V. Jones, a nod to the star of the British gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but used his own address and his own credit card. That mightn’t have been a ...”

“... of accidents if their moral lessons are to be driven home. If we do not take Moll Flanders, Tom Jones and Clarissa Harlowe as more than random individuals, we are at risk of dismissing their stories as of no general import, and thus as of no relevance to ourselves. We might, in other words, read as nominalists rather than as realists. But neither will the ...”

“... here, as opposed to the word ‘writers’ because, while I’m sure Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan and Sapphire could have a perfectly nice conversation, I’m equally sure that their books, if given their druthers, wouldn’t be caught dead on the same shelf.Depending on your point of view, the phenomenon of black women’s writing could be ...”

“... liars, wanderers and transients’, is on the decline. But they probably said that about Tom ...”

“... narratives rather than their moral lessons; but this is also a problem with Moll Flanders, Tom Jones and Clarissa, where we are supposed to do both. The novel is born of the subversive, soap-opera-like recognition that routine reality, the sheer quotidian flow, can be endlessly captivating, and that the mere representation of this process can be an ...”

“... after a near-scholarly account of other Macbeths, as described by Hazlitt, G.H. Lewes and Ellen Terry. Agate had high hopes of the young Olivier, though he ‘should look to his gait, which smacks too much of the modern prize-ring’, and he ought not to have jumped on the dining-table – ‘too much in Hamlet’s vein’. Still, Agate admired ‘a cold ...”

“... Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and ...”

“... turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing way. Yet ...”

“... Lillie began her career as muse, model and archetype to the likes of Millais, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Watts and Poynter within the month. Society was just as quick to take her up. Vanity Fair gushed in 1877: ‘All male London is going wild about the Beautiful Lady who has come to us from the Channel Islands ... She has a husband to make her happy, but ...”