Search Results

“... all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as well as a hulking and immobile target to attack: the annual Salon. The Académie des Beaux-Arts organised it, controlled who and what was shown, awarded prizes and public ...”

“... media professionals for interviews, too. From the newspaper sector, only the British journalist Robert Fisk and I were chosen. ABC News, Channel Four and CNN, whose producer Peter Bergen spotted bin Laden’s importance early on, also accepted. Over the years, so did several Arab and Pakistani networks. The BBC and CBS declined, Atwan writes, out of lack ...”

“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... sources, more likely to cite Mao than Muhammad: in Afghanistan he was known for giving lectures on Robert Taber’s 1965 study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea, once a favourite of the IRA. Al-Suri, Lia writes, was ‘a dissident, a critic and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than ...”

“... grandmother, now had the time and energy and position to put it about that she was descended from Robert E. Lee. She became, like Hughdie, an Episcopalian. Jackie and her sister Lee had two mansions in which to cavort during their teenage years. Their status, however, was precarious. In the summer at Newport, for example, only Hughdie’s real offspring had ...”

“... to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in ...”

“... he forgets what he has done. When his opinions are ingrained they are immovable. In another self-serving anecdote for which Cohn must be the source, Woodward reports this circular exchange: Several times Cohn asked the president, ‘Why do you have these views?’ ‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’ ‘That ...”

“... drug, LSD. (In 1951 he had asked Harold Abramson, a physician on his team, to supervise him in a self-experiment with the drug. Gottlieb reported ‘an out-of-bodyness … a sense of well-being and euphoria’.) Some of his colleagues were interested in the potential effects of dispersing it on the battlefield, but Gottlieb believed LSD was the drug most ...”

“... first reading of Black List, Section H was Stuart’s ability to deal with the notion of a damaged self, someone who was clearly weak, clearly wrong and who felt nothing but contempt for the world around him. I had come across these anti-heroic attitudes in other books, but this was an Irish self, and a man I had met, who ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...”

“... truss, worn from boyhood, and of Updike’s father’s ‘pathetic sweat-stained truss’ in Self-Consciousness. Constance’s mother dies of an aggravated rupture, caused by lifting her invalid husband from bed to bathchair and back again: ‘my mother unconscious and gasping in an awful way looked quite different – sunken and grey. Grandmamma was ...”

“... revolutions, in a series of profiles of, say, Davy, Faraday, Babbage, the Brunels – the self-made men and their machines. They emerge just sufficiently distinguishable from one another and from the politicians and artists they are seen rubbing shoulders with – who in due course appear in clusters of profiles too. While never sounding remotely ...”

“... has heard of: ‘The Hymn to Na’ra’yena’, by the Orientalist Sir William Jones; two poems by Robert Merry and William Parsons, members of the ‘Della Cruscan’ school of English expatriates in Florence; and ‘Soliloquy’ by Ann Yearsley, also known as the Bristol Milkwoman. It’s a micro-anthology of marginal materials by four newcomers (though ...”

“... Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon conceived of a bolder plan and had him enclosed in a box into which he poured seven bushels of plaster of ...”