Search Results

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel has been caught in the Gadarene rush of fiction brought out in time for the Booker Prize deadline. It won’t be lost in this year’s profusion of titles, and it won’t be harmed by the published assurance of a colleague of his on the Times that it is ‘a sure contender’ for the prize ...”

“... unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which is the most narrative book, you could read pretty much anywhere.’ In other words, you could make your own ...”

“... role played by patrons in the formation of public taste, an encomium it would be difficult to read without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the ...”

“... Unconditional Surrender (under its bland American title The End of the Battle). No one today can read the novel’s closing chapters without hearing a pre-echo of current catastrophes: ‘Summer came swiftly and sweetly over the wooded hills and rich valleys of Northern Croatia. Bridges were down and the rails up on the little single-track railway-line that ...”

“... this, and beyond the literary, is a general question of social function. What did a man who could read, read? How many could write more than their name, and why? Greek art shows many scenes of reading, none (outside the schoolroom) of writing: contrast Egyptian art, where writing, the art of the bureaucrat, shows status and ...”

“... sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise and praise again. Peter Levi, alas, is one of those dwindling, disinterested Arnoldians who can still be uncovered in the home of lost causes. Last year he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in his inaugural lecture announced: ‘Today is the feast of Crispinus and ...”

“... could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of ...”

“... and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary. Things were in a bit of a ...”

“... no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already familiar, some new ‘stories’, and episodes from his own encounters with Fleming. The book is a trifle disjointed, but by no means without interest to students ...”

“... was neglected,’ she later wrote, again somewhat misleadingly, for she was well taught at home, read German fluently and knew much of Shakespeare by heart, but no outside influence clouded the vividness of her own earliest impressions or her memory of them. Late in life she recalled what it felt like to wear the ‘absurdly uncomfortable’ clothes into ...”

“... exact art is that it matters whether the book ends, as it did then, with the exchange, ‘Hallo Peter.’ ‘Hallo Dad.’ or as it does now: ‘Hallo Peter.’ ‘Hallo dad.’ For the distinction wouldn’t footle. You would have to interpret ‘Hallo dad’ as a tellingly unique and utterly final act of tacit ...”

“... Onegin, he was having second thoughts. Though by the end of his life he had enough English to read some Wordsworth and Coleridge, his intellectual formation was most indebted either to 18th-century novelists (Sterne, especially, whom he read in French), or classical poets (especially Horace). Pushkin’s intellectual ...”

“... up with them, but the memory of what it is like to do philosophy or geology remains; and when I read about debates that are going on in these areas I believe I know, even if I cannot follow it all, what kind of row or celebration is taking place. Subject-styles, back then, were well reflected in the content of bookshelves. The geologists had ...”

“... authority as a novelist and, above all, as a white South African novelist. It is difficult not to read the opening of his 1992 essay on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly without recalling the terms in which Gordimer framed her charge: To the extent that [Erasmus] became involved in the rivalry between the pope and Luther, his involvement was unwilling. At a ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”