Search Results

“... high or middle-grade erotic printmakers, builders of grottos, providers of poesie to the king of Spain. These various sites and types of image-making amount to a circuitry, in Bull’s opinion, not a set of high-and-low sealed chambers. ‘Somewhere along the route from porn to poesie,’ he says in a not uncharacteristic sentence, ‘the loves of ...”

“... drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely young reader of books … filled with a strange pleasure and the belief that he is the only mortal in the town who has frighteningly understood the meaning of life and death’. When Kerouac’s friend the poet Allen ...”

“... duty-free privilege, but the English intervened. An official letter warned the Hamburg Senate that King William would regard any agreements with the Company of Scotland as an ‘affront’. Paterson and his delegation returned almost empty-handed. Meanwhile, the directors had managed to slow the cash haemorrhage just before the company went broke. The first ...”

“... about the Stone was precisely its absence: the fact that it had been carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even ...”

“... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

“... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...”

“... enters his outhouse to perform the act of defecation that will see him hailed as ‘Moses, Moses, King of the Jews’ who ‘wiped his arse in the Daily News’. Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginary stool sample floating in what he has been presenting as an altar bowl. The shaving bowl ...”

“... was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological strains of legitimising ...”

“... of Borges and rat poison, half-drunk Coca-Cola bottles on the table at the Astor, hairy shoulders, Francis Bacon, ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine any more’ stuck in the groove on the Blind Beggar’s jukebox. But if they were looking for a hagio-graphic fix, a corn-plaster to staunch a terminal haemorrhage, they miscalculated badly. Pearson was not a tame ...”

“... that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century. Jacques Attali’s book is ...”

“... fortress in which were imprisoned the Man in the Iron Mask (said to be the twin brother of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who wanted to keep him out of the way) and Marshal Bazaine, who had the bad luck of having to surrender Metz to the Prussians in 1870 and the good luck to have his death sentence commuted to imprisonment. Apart from this plodding example, the ...”

“... how the continuing clamour of the past acts as a help, not a hindrance, to the making of the new. Francis Bacon is quoted on one of the final walls, saying: ‘To create something … is a sort of echo from one artist to another.’ So there might be – well, there is – a graphite self-portrait by Degas next to the Lorenzo di Credi, then a Legros ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... the screen Nazi he had once or twice played in his early days as an actor; he was a scaled down Francis L. Sullivan, managing nevertheless to be surprisingly successful in finding partners. Not invariably, though. Sometime in the 1970s he was in a New York bath house where the practice was for someone wanting a partner to leave the cubicle door open. This ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”