Search Results

“... Yet he ended his life in comfort, thanks partly to du Bellay, and was buried with honour in St Paul’s Church in Paris. (When that church was demolished they managed to lose his body.) To the end of his life he proudly remained priest and doctor. Of all his books, the text most widely found in older libraries is not one of the volumes of Gargantua or ...”

“... drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and ...”

“... Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium ...”

“... with Augustine). Following a line of argument in the writings of Jesus’s contemporary admirer Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in his earthly life but shaped much subsequent Christian thought, Augustine emphasised that humanity’s disobedience left it helpless before God’s wrath. If God chose to exercise mercy, that was his business; humanity had no ...”

“... felicitousness, when consciousness slots into alignment with the feel of uneven stone under the foot, or the taste of a special flavour on the tongue. Imbued with the whole theatre of the French metaphysical tradition, Proust must have seen at once that this idea could not only be worked up into an impressive intellectual and imaginative thesis, but that it ...”

“... had a mannered post-humous quality. In the most sinister photos, he seems to be standing with one foot squarely planted on the neck of posterity. This camp deadpan, evident despite the bravura of the letters, was not Ginsberg’s style at all. Burroughs’s correspondent would eventually become a generous, open-hearted queen, but, like Whitman, a republican ...”

“... And Corbin suggests that the whole business became rather sexy: ‘the mere contact of a bare foot on the sand was already a sensual invitation and a barely conscious substitute for masturbation,’ he says, though we are not told, in any of the very numerous notes, where this information comes from. He observes other stimuli – there were half-clad ...”

“... The Voyages of Greenpeace, by Robert Hunter and Rex Weyler, told of the pursuit, in an eighty-foot halibut seiner, of the Russian whale fleets. It is all there in the photographs: the ship’s cook Walrus Oakenbough playing a flute; cetologist Paul Spong on his bunk, consulting the I Ching, and so on. But it also showed ...”

“... envisioned by Emerson, who ‘re-attaches things to Nature and the whole’, to Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, crazedly attempting to re-create prelapsarian speech. Olson, it is often pointed out, is the first poet to have described himself as ‘Post-Modern’. That was in 1952. Five years before that he published his first book, Call Me ...”

“... happier and accordingly sadder. ‘If you love your life in this world,’ Matthew remembered Paul opining, ‘you will lose it.’ He loved his life. What sane man wouldn’t. Loss, he figured, stalked him with its scythe. He’d written poems. He liked the sound of words of his own making in his own mouth. He’d met with early and deserved critical ...”

“... its 3000 lbs to 26 batteries, arranged in a clumsy T-frame ‘tunnel’ which sticks up by about a foot between the two passengers – who can scarcely squeeze into what internal space is left. As for luggage, forget it. At current pump prices, US gasoline is cheaper than bottled water. And, relative to the energy it produces, gasoline is light in weight (8 ...”

“... of the Glenn Pool oilfield nearby. The self-proclaimed Oil Capital of the World, where J. Paul Getty began the career that made him the world’s richest man, had seen its population grow 300 per cent over the previous decade, from 18,000 to 72,000 people. Around 10,000 residents were African Americans living in Greenwood, a flourishing neighbourhood ...”

“... them) lining the grand staircase. A naked baby appears as a symbol of contemporary art: at the foot of the stairs, a photographer (George Platt Lynes) zaps the scribbling infant with flashbulbs; on the balcony labelled ‘Museum of Modern Art’, the baby plays hopscotch on a Mondrian, surrounded by Picassos; and at the top of the stairs, the Met’s ...”

“... out in the cold. In ‘Wooden Ships’, a post-nuclear daydream, the singers – Grace Slick and Paul Kantner – are sailing away from America, exchanging iodine tablets with other survivors and looking back at figures on the shoreline moving around in silver hazmat suits. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a travesty of the national anthem performed on a ...”

“... scale and the scarcity of water must have been terrifying to anyone crossing it by beast or on foot. On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be, but the aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views. Now with air conditioning and interstates and the option of ...”