Search Results

“... might seem to be a way of not coming across (though one remembers George Eliot’s pungent vapour Stephen Guest). Perhaps Highsmith can’t quite bear to think that the matter to be contemplated is less that of a liveliness, a life, annulled than of a collusion between something of a personal nullity and modelling’s nubile nullities. More likely, though, is ...”

“... grating playfulness: ‘Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardour of perpetual anticipations.’ Stephen Millhauser, for all his novel’s faults, is dazzlingly gifted, not just in the richly sensual precision and wit of his writing (the ‘hot blue bulb’ of the silver camera flash Edwin’s father brings him, ‘so that he can press his fingernails into ...”

“... Ursula MacParland, paid the fine (or did I imagine that?) and secured her man. She had a small inheritance to spend after the death of her parents and worked as a teacher. She had been, in 1913, one of the earliest women to get a degree from UCD. Whatever there was by way of romance or distinction in my grandmother’s story was undone by the early ...”

“... to demonstrate the superiority of white European settlers. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen Jay Gould showed not only that such theories were based on the disproved belief that cranial capacity predicts intelligence, but that the artificially shaped skulls of preserved ancient Peruvians had often been taken to prove they were a naturally ...”

“... indelible colouring of Scottish society’. Scotland has survived and still exists as a chain of small collective loyalties: ‘Society People’ singing in the hills or clansmen enlisting with their chieftain, colonists on the Vistula or private partnerships in Bengal, crofting townships in Assynt or mining villages in Fife. When Scotland’s last deep ...”

“... peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems ...”

“... they were there to defy the arm of the law . . . If I fired I must fire with good effect, a small amount of firing would be a criminal act of folly . . . I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed . . . If more troops had been on hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the ...”

“... in 1939) only increased the call for Tin Pan Alley ante-bellum nostalgia, a staple product since Stephen Foster’s day. Waller would wage uncivil war on any cotton corn that came his way.Ante-bellum Waller is daring for its day, and still very funny because the objects of his parody are known to us still: Gone with the Wind, of course; the movie Jezebel ...”

“... shot several months before her death. The movie shows her happily dancing at a family party, a small bruise visible on her cheek. BBC 1’s Inside Story ends its coverage of the case with this image of the little dancing girl, the jury foreman insisting on remembering Lisa this way, a beautiful child not here to dance again. In the ...”

“... gun.’[End of chapter.]Who is James Patterson, and why does he write like this?First, a small clue. Hillary Clinton says he’s ‘the master storyteller of our times’. We know that Patterson helped Bill (from Hope, Arkansas) to write his first novel, The President Is Missing, which went to number one on the New York Times bestseller chart after ...”

“... As a teenager,​  I couldn’t find anyone to play chess with me, so I pored over a small yellow copy of Chess Made Easy and set up games against myself. Mine is the 26th edition of Cecil Purdy and Gary Koshnitsky’s primer, first published in 1942. Returning to it recently, I noticed a brief section towards the end on ‘Women in Chess ...”

“... the screen. Or, more exactly, she was in the apartment in the QuickTime window in the screen, the small, shabby, scholarly apartment of Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy.’ In the final paragraph, the image of one of the characters on a computer screen ‘opened its mouth to speak but then unaccountably froze, then stuttered in a disturbing ...”

“... he has become a central subject in New Historicist approaches to Elizabethan studies, notably in Stephen Greenblatt’s Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, the most stimulating modern study of Ralegh. This collection of letters was assembled by the late Agnes Latham, who edited Ralegh’s poems in 1951. It was originally intended as a ...”

“... What he liked about books was that they were ‘pure commodities’: copies of the latest Stephen King sold online would be no better or worse than those sold in shops. But no actual shop was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled distribution for most American ...”

“... in print, Eliot signed him up with Faber and organised a group of backers to provide him with a small regular income. Barker had just married his sister’s friend Jessica Woodward and gone to live in a cottage in Dorset, but it isn’t clear if Eliot knew why. The reason given was that his new bride was consumptive; the truth was she was pregnant and they ...”