Search Results

“... aisles. They’d vomit. Break guitars over each other’s heads. You can’t be having that on a nice train.’ You’ll find the same sentiment echoing around the hostelries of Dublin’s Temple Bar, where stag nights have been banned, proprietors believing that the Ryanair generation has made a mockery of the art of running amok. Over on cheap flights from ...”

“... glad,” he said.’ One afternoon, Lewis read Aykroyd Arthur Koestler’s article on Richard Hillary, the fighter pilot and author of The Last Enemy. On 25 May Lewis had written to Gweno: ‘What twaddle of Koestler’s about him being wilfully led to a fascinating death!’ Now his voice cracked as he came to a passage that described a time ...”

“... no notion how fast it was galloping at that very moment to overtake me.’ ‘Galloping’ is a nice touch, since narrative custom mostly suggests that destiny sneaks up on us, that it can’t be seen in the offing. Jake’s ‘I had no notion’ respects this principle but the rest of the sentence ruins it, plants us firmly in narrating rather than ...”

“... cardboard boxes filled with mementos and ephemera (there were over 600 in his estate). In a nice twist Koestenbaum adopts a nickname that Warhol dropped early on, ‘Andy Paperbag’, which evokes not only his compulsion to collect but also the fragility of this protective device. More ominously, he writes of the Campbell’s Soup Cans and Brillo Boxes ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”

“... Essex Man (easy access to the M25). An eco-zone for butterflies, deer, asylum-seeking birds. The nice thing about no-go, Official-Secrets-Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick woods, screening concrete bunkers and hunchbacked huts from the eyes of the curious, provide an excellent habitat for shy fauna, for ...”

“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... closed for cleaning) in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan ...”

“... professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... wrote his mother from Cambridge from 1936 to 1938. Ironically, the letters themselves (edited by Richard Kelly in We dream of honour, 1988) often have the bathetic tone, the self-mocking grandiosity, on which The Dream Songs thrives but which the simple lyrics in Love – Fame rarely achieve. Berryman’s ‘Afterword’ to the first British edition of the ...”

“... and envy. Disapproval of English critical ‘conversation’ spills over into a censure of Richard Rorty: for just as the new, fully professional criticism is fighting free of ‘conversation’, that English laxity, Rorty is calling on philosophers to take it up. Yet a certain envy remains. The book oscillates between a lofty endorsement of high-level ...”

“... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...”

“... nor the darkness of sexual desire has changed so very much.’ He also writes that the allusion in Richard II to Phaethon universalises the King’s situation and that this in its turn contributes to ‘the enduring power’ of Shakespearean tragedy. I would guess that such sentences will attract a now almost automatic hostility. Lewis himself allowed that ...”