Search Results

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... There are scattered in this volume some excellent sketches of his contemporaries. There is Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, whose ‘father and mother went to Rome in their own carriage’ and whose son became Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. Tennyson himself, Sassoon says, ‘never looked more bard-like than Bridges did when I arrived this evening ...”

“... were ‘the heirs of Swift, Berkeley and Grattan’. Not quite: he cited Burke, Grattan, Swift, Robert Emmet and Parnell, but not Berkeley. On Mahaffy: it may be that McDowell, who joined with W.B. Stanford to write the life of Mahaffy, has tired of the man, but the account of him in the present book makes him appear tawdry and obvious. His views on the ...”

“... in terms of years, the length of office of editors of Annales such as Burguière, Marc Eerro Robert Mandrou. (His conclusion? ‘If at first you don’t succeed ... ’) He has carefully mapped out – in the style of Jacques Bertin, the admirable draughtsman of Annales – the geographical origins of the contributors to the Mélanges Febvre of 1953 and ...”

“... from the earlier study of the Marthe Brossier case and its 17th-century successors by Professor Robert Mandrou. In this context it is interesting to note that Charles Miron, Bishop of Angers, who exposed Marthe as a fraud with almost casual ease before she even reached Paris, was himself the son of Henri III’s premier médecin. Marescot’s report on the ...”

“... coulisses of Argentine politics, and can fairly be called a participant as well as a commentator. Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald, who writes with the authority of a fellow editor whose support for Timerman never wavered, says that ‘La Opinion gave lukewarm support for human rights and ... maintained weathervane policies according to the views of ...”

“... Casaubon in Middlemarch; Mrs Humphry Ward gave a vivid picture of Pattison as Squire Wendover in Robert Elsmere, a Victorian best-seller; and Rhoda Broughton, the novelist who knew the Rector best, produced a cruel portrait in her slight and perfunctory novel Belinda. But this, alas, only illustrates the force of Henry James’s passionate statement to a ...”

“... are those which are rhetorically the most skilful, whether the rhetoric is natural or concocted. Robert Lekachman, ‘a helplessly awkward intellectual sort of kid’, was drafted into the Navy after Pearl Harbor: Our first operation was in Guam. That was the first time I saw a dead Japanese. He looked pitiful, with his thick glasses. He had a sheaf of ...”

“... rhetoric which had clogged much of his early writing. By the time his now famous friendship with Robert Frost began late in 1913, the stage was set for him to begin the work on which his reputation mainly rests. Frost’s bullish example convinced him to trust his instincts so absolutely that within a matter of months prose seemed an inadequate vehicle for ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”

“... like toadies in the matter of the atomic tests; and the worst offender was the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, described by one Australian senator as ‘the little lickspittle empire loyalist who regarded Australia as a colonial vassal of the British Crown’. ‘The British Government’s public statements of confidence that all was well with the nuclear ...”

“... outside ourselves of all that is bad in the world and in us. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil called this process the making of ‘displeasure-images’, and identified it as ‘part of the oldest psychotechnical apparatus mankind possesses’. Together with our tendency to take things figuratively, this is the mechanism which complies with ...”

“... I once received this stern admonition from an English editor: ‘If you intend to be a Japanese novelist whom we are translating into English, okay – I accept your manuscript as it is and will get on with publication. But if you wish to be considered an English writer, then you must rewrite. Don’t narrate to us, show us. And-then-and-then is not the way we want a story told ...”

“... to dwell on the mixture of manners, the ‘tension between the styles’. Everett suggests that Robert Hitchens’s Bella Donna, a bestseller which figures in the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 – a fine English murder – was one of Eliot’s sources, and that he had been reading Gentlemen prefer blondes and Ring Lardner, here described with some ...”

“... higher. In 1949 the combination of a small legacy, frustration at Putnam, and my friendship with Robert Kee, led to the founding of the firm that bore our names, with my wife as literary director. I soon discovered, though, that my temperament is not that of a loner, and seven years later, when the time had come to raise new capital (an aspect of business I ...”