Search Results

“... duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded off suspicion. But the real reason this triangular relationship endured unmolested was surely that, in some crucial sense, all three principals played by the ...”

“... When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to ...”

“... bias. At the 2009 US Open a brave/foolhardy tennis line judge called a foot-fault against Serena Williams at the climax of her semi-final against Kim Clijsters. Subsequent replays showed the call was correct. But it provoked outrage. Line judges rarely call foot-faults, since they don’t want to look conspicuous. What was this one doing interposing herself ...”

“... enemy of America, Pound knew that people there regarded him as one. His old friend William Carlos Williams called him ‘Lord Ga-Ga’, and Pound told an Italian friend in 1941 that ‘I see by a Chicago rag that I am “charged with fascism”.’ By mid-1943, some time after the United States had entered the war, Pound had heard that he’d been indicted ...”

“... factors too. He likes to combine ‘chance and the creative will’, and wrote a poem about John Cage using the I Ching. He said he composed the opening lines of his great work Sunstone (1957) ‘in a state that was almost like sleepwalking’, and added that he was ‘shocked that those lines later struck [him] as beautiful’. But then the unconscious ...”

“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... completed) drama of modern life called ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, as well as a translation of Saint-John Perse’s prose poem Anabase, which didn’t appear until 1930. ‘I thought my poetry was over after “the Hollow Men”,’ he acknowledged later. It was some years before he discovered that this wasn’t the case. Overwhelmingly, these letters give us ...”

“... condescendingly, because he was none of these things. 21 April. A lunch party at the Connaught for John Gielgud’s 90th birthday given by Alec Guinness. John G. in an olive-green corduroy suit, elbows pressed firmly into his sides, hands clasped over his tummy, smiling and giggling and bubbling over with things to say and ...”

“... turn by the two writers Chernyshevsky most admired, Godwin and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But Caleb Williams and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are like Macbeth and Lear in comparison with What is to be done? In the radical climate of the time it had immense success, nonetheless; and Lenin himself, sixty years later, used to flush with anger at any suggestion that it was ...”

“... years have seen the publication of important collections of theatrical letters; those of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, for instance, brilliantly illuminate their personalities, their times and their artistic struggles. The Letters of Cole Porter, for all its piquant tidbits, is not in that league. Part of the problem is that the editors have been dealt a ...”

“... Calligrammes, Pound’s Cantos, the spatial innovations of Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Cage. But spatiality functions in other less obvious, if no less important ways. The formating of a printed text (book or otherwise), the conventions of book production which dictate what sorts of framing ...”

“... that Mary was ‘a beauty’ with many young men to choose among. That the one she decided on, John Moore, was known only for his sense of humour and love of the theatre is puzzling at first – she has seemed so earnest – but it turns out that performance was something she too enjoyed. Pretending to be someone or something else, preferably a small ...”

“... for putting oneself to this task. Isherwood expressed this with typical simplicity in a letter to John Lehmann in July 1939: ‘I am so sick of being a person.’ The beginnings of his interest in Eastern religion were not easy, and this book starts out by conveying powerfully the Tennysonian quality of ‘honest doubt’ that Isherwood felt towards the whole ...”

“... the J.C. Squire literary atmosphere, which Dunn summons up by a pretence of       being a John Buchan of the underdog With my waistcoated breast puffed against the wind. And yet however well organised it is, much of the overt ‘feeling’ in these poems, as in many of those in the anthology, remains second-hand, not truly sui generis; and the reason ...”

“... of the law of treason by Eyre (which has recently attracted renewed ironical attention from John Barrell) which was hurled into print on the very eve of the notorious Treason Trials of 1794. The second piece is the ‘Considerations’ on the Two Acts (1795), in which Godwin seemed to come forward (anonymously) to condone legislation against popular ...”