Search Results

“... In a remote coastal town to the south-west of Corinth is the grave-site of Norman MacKay. In accordance with Greek Christian Orthodoxy, his bones have been dug up, washed with wine and laid in a box the length of his thigh-bone. The townspeople believe MacKay dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima from the B29 ‘Enola Gay’ on the morning of 6 August 1945 ...”

“... one molecule thick): why shouldn’t it be almost as combustible as coal? I learned this fact from Tobias Hill’s second novel, The Love of Stones (2001), which is a mine of such information. Hill has done his homework, and for those who like this sort of thing, there’s plenty to be got out of the novel. At the ...”

“... Personal identity, according to Locke, is a creation of memory. The American writer Tobias Wolff has already published one volume of memoirs. Now, at the age of 49, he has produced a second. Who can blame him? His father was a conman and impostor: Arthur Samuels Wolff, aka Arthur Saunders Wolff III, aka Saunders Answell-Wolff III, the ‘Duke’ of Tobias’s brother Geoffrey’s memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979 ...”

“... of some nursery tale, or a fiction about a writer writing the fiction you are reading,’ Tobias Wolff confessed in his 1993 introduction to the Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories. Writing fiction about a writer who is writing the fiction we are reading, Wolff would have us understand, is obscene. A writer reaching out from behind the ...”

“... we know he didn’t regularly attend a church. It is fair enough to describe him, as Christopher Hill did, as a radical Protestant heretic; but while Milton’s heterodoxy has become more widely acknowledged among scholars in recent years, there is still a good deal of confusion as to what it does and does not mean. ‘Orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’, as the ...”

“... divines. Equally important were the antinomians who had remained in England – John Eaton, Tobias Crisp and Henry Denne, whom Kendall discusses, and a host of others, mainly lower-class radicals, who were terrifying the respectable godly in the 1640s. Men like Lawrence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe were already preaching pretty fundamental antinomian ...”

“... Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series of Guardian ...”

“... democracies would slide into despotism. Mill made resisting social norms a social duty of its own.Tobias Kelly and Anna Neima are Millians. Both authors admire their subjects. Kelly’s are the conscientious objectors who refused to fight during the Second World War; Neima’s are the creators of the utopian community of Dartington Hall. Both show how ...”

“... Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an actor; and Vanessa Shaw, a bluestocking academic. The writers in contention (if only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and ...”

“... once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American publisher, J.B. Lippincott, decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval ...”