Search Results

“... dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary jokiness). Unreadability, McGann says, can be a virtue. The poems of Emily Dickinson, unpublished in her lifetime, test editorial practice. McGann’s account of ...”

“... series of quixotic pensioners’ ‘adventures’. She imagines them setting off into the ‘wide brown land’, one in a bath chair, the other on a specially designed tricycle, destined to become ‘a well-loved Australian institution’. Though peculiarly his own, Paul’s resistance to Elizabeth’s authorial desires, like his resistance to the discourses ...”

“... art museums they designed (the list includes Gehry, Hollein, Nouvel, Stirling and Venturi-Scott Brown). ‘The two Swiss,’ Newhouse observed, ‘are convinced that artists have keener perceptive abilities than architects’ and, in consequence, have frequently worked with artists as advisers. She also commented on the importance of such Minimalist artists ...”

“... quite simple – natural, very dignified, has a charming smile – the most beautiful golden brown piercing eyes which you see but can’t look at – When he came in everyone (women too) got up as if he were a King – You couldn’t help doing it. A few days later Clementine reports that she has received a signed photograph from Mussolini. It is ...”

“... a Soviet-era building the size of five football pitches. Meetings involved walking down miles of brown corridors, to a smoke-filled boardroom where a producer would quite comfortably say: ‘We need something to keep the nation pacified. The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried. Ideas?’ The other group was made up of the entertainment ...”

“... in the Kremlin had been done in the name of protecting ‘business in Russia’ from the ‘brown-red’ menace. But the professional economic reformers had always been his enemies: they saw his rigged privatisations as blocking the creation of a real market, and were delighted when Putin expelled him. From the evidence in court it was clear that ...”

“... of fractured looking on the internet; either way, it is full of diverting detail. In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey ‘dayly come wreeking hot out of a Bawdy-House into the Church; and others Stagger out of a Tavern to Afternoon-Prayers, and Hickup over a little of the Littany, and so back ...”

“... survived in office after ditching his mistress via text message – it’s hard to imagine Gordon Brown getting away with that. But now and again, one hears a keening strain from the old country. On the Alexanderinkatu recently a dress shop was enticing passers-by with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, the D:Ream chantalong which Labour ran as its theme tune ...”

“... Jump blues groups of the 1940s such as Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Wynonie Harris performed on what was called the ‘chitlin’ circuit’, clubs and dance halls across the rural South and in the black districts of northern and southern cities. Few whites listened to the music, and it certainly wasn’t played on ...”

“... and which, again to various extents, replaced argument and intellect by Revelation. Dr Catherine Brown’s study ploughs a narrower furrow, but this too is based on sound erudition and considerable insight. The great Chancellor, Jean Gerson, has become a shadowy figure outside histories of mysticism or of Medieval literature which touch on his philosophical ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from King’s Cross, and if the face happened to be brown, they looked to their bag or backpack. That is how fear and paranoia work: they create turbulence in your everyday passivity, and everyone was affected after the attempted bombings on 22 July in ways that won’t quickly go away. In the realm of ...”

“... barons). The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to ...”

“... the host and another boy hide in a closet. While waiting to be released, Stuart tries to talk Peter into stuffing as many marshmallows as possible down the side of his cheek, while still managing to sing the school song; another boy, Ryan, managed 14. No one dies, though I’m not quite sure why. In its harmless way, the thing seems perfectly ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”