Search Results

“... agency – I now suspect my silences contain the best of me.          And I’m a man who likes talking          to a man who likes to talk.          I never said that, Sidney Greenstreet said it. And even now a form of words can surely be found for my feelings when, packing up to move on ...”

“... textual interpretation. Particularly irksome is the claim of conceptual rhetoricians like Paul de Man that philosophy has not yet caught up with ‘elementary refinements’ that criticism has long since taken for granted. Deconstruction goes furthest towards contesting the status of philosophy by showing how its concepts finally come down to the ...”

“... via a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital. As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the trains. He placed the headstones round an ash tree sapling, now grown tall, where I stop sometimes to look at the stones crowding round the old tree like children ...”

“... According to Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries ...”

“... real models, each a slightly different concept, reverberate in the mind like one of Charles and Ray Eames’s own designs. Husband and wife, the Eameses were architects and furniture designers, notably of the plywood and leather armchair and ottoman that has become a classic if not a cliché of the modernist interior and the ubiquitous moulded plastic ...”

“... can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). With a decidedly slim catalogue (four studio albums) but an outsized posthumous reputation, they are not an easy act to place in the history of popular music. Nor is it easy to identify the band as a unit, since members came and went. ‘The Velvet ...”

“... riddle of life is in the structure of proteins,’ he replied, ‘and it can be solved only by X-ray crystallography.’ The Great Sage was John Desmond Bernal, a flamboyant Irishman with a mane of fair hair, crumpled flannel trousers and a tweed jacket. We called him Sage, because he knew everything, from physics to the history of art. Knowledge poured from ...”

“... Story of a Man last time a man was sealed in skin like an inspoken word sealed in it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering and he could just make out the fluttering light it was warm, it was days you walk out without a coat and little rain showers dash across the carpark and he stood there, like a man on film, going on with his heartwork at last at last he could think clearly this is myself, he said, rubbing round all four sides of my breeze-block patience this is one or two flying strands of my eyes this is my heart’s halo’s prismatic subdivisions there were people bringing chairs to the fire-escapes, peering down ...”

“... as many as nine. ‘Hello, I am H.L. Hunt,’ he would introduce himself. ‘I’m the richest man in the world.’ In the 1950s that wasn’t far from the truth, but because Hunt flew economy, parked his car five hundred yards away from his Dallas office to avoid parking meters and sent his children to state schools, you wouldn’t have guessed. After ...”

“... point of view, is worth the single frame of the murderer’s face as he watches a black man in a shower. His whole look goes glazed with wonder and baffled desire, sheds its mask of ordinariness. This is the sort of moment movies are for: we know the man through his yearning, see that he will never allow himself ...”

“... on the innocence of Caitlin, an American actress visiting her daughter in Honduras. She meets a man from the US embassy who speaks in the glib voice of imperialism: ‘We’re not just here because we go all gooey inside when we think about the relationship between free enterprise and democracy!’ She drives around the countryside in a jeep with a friend ...”

“... on the Innocks Estate in North Nibley; tiles were ripped from the bus shelter, and Councillor Ray Manning – hero of the moment – has removed a broken seat. I pick up a copy of the Gazette later on, and see there is more. A £300 Amaco mountain bike (‘with 21 gears, coloured purple and black’) was stolen from a garage at Clingre Farm, Stinchcombe ...”