Search Results

“... Frank Kermode’s History and Value reads the literature of the Thirties as ‘a love story, almost a story of forbidden love’. The story is usually told in political terms, but the characters and actions in Kermode’s version and in the conventional version are the same: the poets and novelists who hoped to serve a proletarian revolution that would abolish their privilege and consume their class ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big ...”

“... regarded this as its best effort was widely thought to be embarrassing. As the movie’s director Robert Zemeckis gave his speech of acceptance (which he did, excruciatingly, by speaking ‘on behalf of Forrest Gumps everywhere’), the girl seated next to Madonna, in the words of my colleague Frank DiGiacomo, ‘turned to ...”

“... of a Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has included Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, James Hum ham and Russell Kirk perhaps overstresses the origin of these conflicts in individual idiosyncrasies. For conflict and contradiction are at the heart of the principles of American intellectual conservatism. Some of its adherents are ...”

“... migration to the mode of Helliconia Spring, his first Tolkienian novel. The novelist is always frank about his ambitions. He is quite prepared to take advantage of a handy centenary to compare his work to Joyce’s, as he did in print a few weeks ago. In a recklessly chin-leading pre-publication advertisement for Helliconia Spring, entitled ‘The Making ...”

“... the ‘last outburst of peasant rage to result in murder’. The Village of Cannibals, like Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre, confirms the degree to which social historians, building on the Annales tradition, have embraced cultural anthropology and the study of popular political language over time. Darnton calls it ‘history in the ethnographic ...”

“... nibbled at by the sharp tooth of development. But it still just about holds. In Sprawl, Robert Bruegmann bids those of us who cherish the division between city and countryside to take stock and review our values. Everywhere, the arbitrary containment of communities is dead or dying, he argues. Where it is maintained, it is only at a cost and by a ...”

“... is going to be genuinely heartbroken. There’s always a gap. It was on Woman’s Hour. Poor old Frank.’ ‘I’ve never understood,’ said Midgley, ‘why you call him Frank. He’s my father.’ She looked at the 1953 Coronation Mug, wondering if it was altogether too recent an artefact to have on display. ‘He has a ...”

“... its own casual polyvalence. In Why Solange Matters there’s a pithy quote about stereotyping from Frank Ocean (whose own phenomenal album Blonde also came out in 2016): ‘If you’re a singer and you’re Black, you’re an R&B artist. Period.’ In the years since, Solange and Ocean have both worked their own stealthy way beyond his unspoken limit. Solange ...”

“... The person chiefly responsible for the new note of jollity was Charles Hamilton, better known as Frank Richards, who made a Never Never Land of the English public school, but did it with such dash, amiability and authority that every subsequent generation, right up to the present, has contained its quota of Greyfriars enthusiasts. Greyfriars came into being ...”

“... for the Italia Prize), I went for a thoughtful walk with the then Director of Sound Broadcasting, Frank Gillard (the predecessor, at a removal or two, of Aubrey Singer) – who, I hope, is reading these lines and is invited to react to them. I drew his attention to the utter absurdity of our Gramophone Department’s responsibility for serious music ...”

“... and strait-laced brother Walter. He now immersed himself in British and American literature: Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, above all Kipling. He became the leading figure in a bohemian gang who wrote and sang songs together, drank, chased girls and shocked respectable burghers. He narrowly avoided being expelled from school: a teacher argued in his ...”

“... German government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would ...”

“... the paper’s reputation to the high point it enjoyed during the Second World War, first under Frank Owen and then under Michael Foot. Editing the Evening Standard was a much tougher task for Wintour than for his more recent successors, since the Rothermere Evening News was still in his time outselling its rival in the London market by roughly half a ...”

“... inventiveness and inquisitiveness. In his ‘Answer to Voznesensky – Evtushenko’, Frank O’Hara writes: ‘We are tired of your tiresome imitations of Mayakovsky/we are tired of your dreary tourist ideas of our Negro selves.’ O’Hara’s rebuff to the two Russian poets shows him as a weird and unsuspected nationalist: but it also makes ...”