Search Results

“... Annie Dillard (1945-) and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom ...”

“... the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and of commemoration – not least, as a tribute paid by one of the living to great artists. An essay on Marlowe sets ...”

“... by international finance capital to destroy the nation-state. In 2016, the New York Times reported Donald Trump’s allegation that ‘Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.’ In her Conservative Party Conference speech the same year, Theresa May ...”

“... ostensibly looking for stories but mainly just looking’. It’s January 2017, just after Donald Trump’s election, and something’s up. She’s suspicious of Felix, her boyfriend of eighteen months: ‘Felix had revealed himself to be completely unrevealing, insisting over and over as I baited and nagged and implored him to tell me his innermost ...”

“... benchmark acts as a reference for a different grade and quality of oil. Brent sets the price for light North Sea crude, and since offshore petroleum is easy to transport by ship, it’s the main measure of market prices in many parts of the world. West Texas Intermediate, which is distributed by pipeline across North America, sets the domestic price of oil ...”

“... work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ‘outriders’. She was excluded from Donald Allen’s landmark anthology New American Poetry (1960) and was ‘not asked to literary events, though I published with everyone in the usual places, worked side-by-side with the men … As a woman, I was invisible.’The Beat movement is remembered as ...”

“... Raiding, they said, was the bedouin national sport, like league football or county cricket.’ (Donald Rumsfeld appears to have taken a similarly sporting attitude to recent looting in Baghdad, although his tolerance would presumably not encompass looting by the poor of presidential palaces and museums in, say, Washington DC.) The British as occupying power ...”

“... ethics, politics and jurisprudence – notwithstanding its debt to professional economists such as Donald Winch – has emerged during a period when the history of economics has become at best semi-detached from economics as a discipline. Nevertheless, there remain some historically inclined economists with a keen nose for anachronism who question whether it ...”

“... and my eyes failed, I was neither/Living nor dead and I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence.’ On at least one occasion, in 2002, by the Pont d’Arcole in Paris, he came close to suicide. He was saved by his father’s mantra: ‘Work and survive.’ But the sense of powerlessness persisted. His father ‘has always seemed to me the ...”

“... journal (Philosophical Studies, still one of the field’s leading journals), he edited textbooks (Donald Davidson once said that he ‘got through graduate school’ by reading Feigl and Sellars’s Readings in Philosophical Analysis), he was by all accounts a charismatic and devoted teacher, and he clearly believed in academic philosophy as a discipline ...”

“... 1962, after going through many titles, more than one publisher (she moved from Horace Liveright to Donald Brace to Atlantic and Little, Brown) and many published extracts. Of this long, intense, drifting allegorical fable, set on a sea voyage from Vera Cruz to Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and consisting of episodic, repetitive ...”

“... three or four acute details. One person mentioned in passing has ‘unrealistically white teeth, light pink hair, and an Instagram following of 36K’. After the birth of her oldest daughter, ‘Alix’s world became a place defined by Pack-’n-Plays, white noise machines, chafed areolas and grapes cut in half.’ Another character is summed up: ‘Long ...”

“... you must make work or else you blow it. Sincere intent alone is not enough: For though the tone is light, the rules are tough. The last line could be his credo as a poet, but it is possible to read it slightly otherwise than he intends us to. The tough rules are to be used as redemptive agents for the ‘prosaic voice’ he claims is his own true poetic ...”

“... advance of Axis guns’, and who ‘from that time on ... could never see Pound in an unambiguous light, or think of him as other than the most problematic of poets’. Morgan goes on to describe his admiration for Pound’s poetry, his liking for the ‘bouncy, unrancid, echt-American Pound’ of Patria Mia, and his repulsion for Pound’s politics: ‘I ...”

“... so hate anyone who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one ...”