Search Results

“... Once upon a time, a distinguished French Department in a well-known British university set a question on Diderot in its Final Examination. Owing to a couple of unfortunate misprints, his name appeared as ‘Piderst’. Understandably, it was not a popular question. But it did attract one answer, from a candidate who discussed the merits of Piderst with enthusiasm, if in rather general terms ...”

“... Paglia’s handling of the questions from the audience is good-natured and clever (‘As a fan of Robert Mapplethorpe I can’t object to being abused in public!’). To MIT students fresh from a day of classes in aeronautical engineering and computer science, it must have been a heady experience.The confident and witty persona of the MIT lecture, however, is ...”

“... the workforce from which they were drawn. Such revisionist interpretations have been described by Robert Hughes as ‘normalising’ the convicts, and further instalments along similar lines can be expected; but no amount of normalising can remove the scars from the backs of the victims of the Antipodean Gulag. And while Hughes himself made significant ...”

“... with egg yolk and oats and then exposed to the mercy of two hungry ducks. A merchant called Robert Nettleton was awarded the rank of ‘archimandrite’ in a club called the British Monastery, although he also allowed his house to be used for divine service and was actively involved in petitioning George I for assistance in building an English ...”

“... pilot officer’. While Ashton and many other male dancers performed their wartime duties, Robert Helpmann took advantage of their absence to promote himself, which Ashton resented as much as the fact that Helpmann, who was Australian, did not join up. Ashton used their rivalry to subtle comic effect when they played the Ugly Sisters in ...”

“... wormwood to the Calvinist Scot), ‘Hudson’s Statue’ (a proposed monument to a Mid-Victorian Robert Maxwell), ‘Stump Oratory’ (politicians’ lies). Carlyle’s intention was to wield what he called ‘the red hot poker’ – whether to cauterise or do an Edward II on the body politic is not clear. The whole is suffused with his mood of ...”

“... from the classics, which all readers above the rank of ragamuffin were expected to recognise. Sir Robert Peel (Sir Rhubarb Pill) did duty as Pandora, Ceres, Phaeton and Sisyphus. However, when the Duke of Buckingham was shown as ‘The Modern Eresicthon’ preparing to eat his own head, the magazine thought fit to explain that Eresicthon of Thessaly, having ...”

“... on Walt Whitman and ‘the idea that people contain multitudes and contradictions’, and on Robert Frost – ‘The Road Not Taken’, according to Strane, ‘isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice’. They read Edgar Allan Poe, who (Vanessa knows) married his ...”

“... the predominant buyer in the market, capable of dictating the terms of trade. This success led Robert Thorpe, the former chief justice of the colony, to launch a scathing attack on the company in the London press. By dominating trade in Sierra Leone, he argued, wasn’t Macaulay & Babington acting as a domineering economic agent of the sort that Smith and ...”

“... of The Old Child – which seems at first to be playing rather bookishly with motifs from Robert Walser and Thomas Mann – is also explained, though even after she has been unmasked as an adult, the central character doesn’t disclose her motives.As Erpenbeck tells us, these false childhoods can be interpreted in various ways. The old child might be ...”

“... well as much of the Israeli public, regards as evidence of their humanitarian ethos. But not even Robert Menendez, one of the US Senate’s most redoubtable supporters of Israel, was persuaded. ‘I am deeply troubled,’ he said, ‘by reports of Israeli military actions that resulted in the death of innocent civilians in Gaza as well as Israeli targeting of ...”

“... to regain control of barricaded republican areas. Much to the chagrin of the British commander, Robert Ford, the IRA was thus enabled to fight another day – and a bloodbath was avoided. During the early years of the conflict the main tendency of this contact switched from operational discussions to high-level engagement aimed at a settlement.The first ...”

“... of ideological nuance. Consider Reg Prentice (Labour to Tory), Shaun Woodward (Tory to Labour) and Robert Jackson (Tory to Labour), all of whom defected directly from one of the two main parties to the other, when a more gentle transition to the Liberal middle ground might have carried more ideological plausibility. In any case the gulfs within parties can ...”

“... trip. Perhaps it was always unlikely that someone whose models were Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Tzara, Robert Walser and Gottfried Benn would win prizes, honours or even a sizeable readership in Britain or the US. And his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased ...”

“... the world?Behavioural economics proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s. Its early adoptees included Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his research on asset price volatility and the psychology of bubbles. Economics and psychology are now closer than ever, with new fields like neuro-economics using fMRIs to map the way the brain processes ...”