Search Results

“... with those of his poetical peers whom he saw as responding to the world or to imperatives of their craft: ‘As for me, I was an autobiographer restlessly searching for forms in which to express the stages of my development.’ This passage, like much of Spender, is more egotistical than it knows: that each successive stage of his ‘development’ should ...”

“... born-again brazenness. In an analysis of Christopher Hitchens and his historic predecessor in the craft, George Orwell, in the LRB (23 January 2003), Stefan Collini coined a superb descriptive phrase: what the reborns stand for is ‘the "no-bullshit” bullshit’ of anti-liberalism, re-equipped with post-9/11 riot gear. In differing ways both Todd and Soros ...”

“... poems makes a reader feel that he can only approve the poet’s judgment in not collecting them; Robert Conquest plunges the reader into an obscure background involving reciprocal limericks which were no doubt funny at the time but which are not (unlike those Monteith quotes) funny enough now. In the absence of any more exact sense of subject and form, these ...”

“... of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. Southmere Lakeside and the soothing water features contrived by Robert Rigg as part of a GLC initiative in the 1960s had turned sour by the time of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Dystopian violence overcame the innocence of Corbusier-influenced architects and planners hoping for a brutalist iteration ...”

“... the Sun in 1969, after he’d bought the News of the World from the Carr organisation, defeating Robert Maxwell en route. The News of the World is a Sunday paper, so it was a point of elementary commercial logic to start a daily paper to accompany it, in order that the presses would not lie idle during the week. Larry Lamb, the Sun’s first ...”

“... historians in Canberra began to think about 1988 as a year offering a special opportunity to their craft. That year, we guessed, would inspire a larger and more general commemoration than Australians had organised at the end of any previous half-century. The coming occasion was sure to be more national than those others, for advances in central ...”

“... stack for coal-fired boilers to the golden galleon that caught the wind as a weathervane. This craft was a symbol of locality by which those staggering home from a cluster of pubs could safely navigate. Ships on weathervanes and pub signs confirmed London’s self-confidence as a world port. But the tarnished galleon on Whiston Road was empty, its ...”

“... Of course you are.Auden’s openings, on the other hand, were launched against a flow. The craft itself felt watertight and shipshape, but its motions seemed unpredictable, it started in mid-pitch and wobbled:Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,On the wet road between the chafing grass ...    Between grass? What do you    mean? Where is ...”

“... milieu and the Parisian literary underground made familiar in the scholarly work of Robert Darnton. At a longer distance, the aim is to declare Gillray the blood brother of ‘tinkers, tailors, blacksmiths, cobblers’. The scratched and stippled surface of an abandoned Gillray sketch is said to show his ‘unusual attempt to increase the ...”

“... The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of ...”

“... Writing Manufacturers’, Novak suggests that he was aware of the materials of the writer’s craft ‘as no other writer of his time’ – and Crusoe is here symbolically imaging those materials and that dogged deployment of technical skill. He is also brooding on Sedgemoor again, because after constructing the grindstone Crusoe kills three birds and ...”

“... writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained ...”

“... that any admiration he felt would be quite severely qualified. So with Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), one of the books we who were undergraduates in the 1930s were persuaded to read. Lubbock was a disciple of James and a strong point-of-view man. Forster treats him fairly gently; he was a Kingsman and had been Forster’s boss in Egypt ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”