Search Results

“... twenty pages. Typically, their form is that of a cascade, one intellectual reference – author or passage – tumbling after another, in a swift, staccato procession, to a sudden end. In one case, we move: from Paolo Sarpi through Augustine, Cicero, Vasari, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Hegel, Heine, Baudelaire, Semper, Scott, Riegl, Feyerabend, Simone Weil and ...”

“... even his eternal power and Godhead.’ In Faraday’s Bible, also prominently on display, the same passage is marked. The message is even spelled out for the inattentive: Faraday belonged to a small Christian sect, the Sandemanians, and ‘believed firmly that in studying science he was investigating the laws written into the Universe by God.’ This is not ...”

“... a mountain quarry in British Columbia. Fossils had first been discovered there by a US geologist, Charles Walcott, in 1909 (as Gould convincingly shows, from Walcott’s diaries). In the next eight years, Walcott collected over eighty thousand specimens and deposited them in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He never found the time to work on them as ...”

“... certainly do. The essays edited by Egger (not all of which are as execrably written as that passage) and Serial Killers, the energetic but infuriatingly sloppy book by a psychologist called Joel Norris, could hardly be more alarming about the extent of the phenomenon. Norris cites an unspecified report from the FBI to the effect that, in ...”

“... in an incongruous inner ring of like-minded persons, including Tolkien, a Catholic convert, and Charles Williams, a Cockney original with a decidedly creepy inner life, and an extraordinary talent for updating the mystico-religious poetic attitudes of the Fin-de-Siècle. Thus was born the Inklings, an unexclusive but very characteristic group of like-minded ...”

“... was, which was why Taylor and Hessey, the young firm which took over Keats’s Poems of 1817 from Charles Ollier, were prepared to treat him so generously. They did the same for Clare. In the event, neither poet made it commercially: in Keats’s case, because success had to be on his own terms, and these went against the grain of his natural genius. He did ...”

“... world was proposed at St Andrews in 1720, its odd title hinting at French roots, and the career of Charles Rollin, Professeur d’Eloquence au Collège Roial et associé à L’Académie Roiale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, encouraging Crawford to conclude that, together with the phrase ‘Belles Lettres’, ‘Eloquence’ begins effectively to map out ...”

“... definitive in its field, handsomely produced, and has the virtue of introducing the Provençal Charles Mauron – who possessed one of the most incisive intellects associated with the group – to a hitherto unacquainted anglo-phone readership. Blythe’s story starts in 1912, when the Nashes and Carrington emerge from the Slade School, and trails past the ...”

“... Consider the wartime movie, Pimpernel Smith, in which the stupid and wicked German reads out a passage of Wodehouse, alleging that it is unfunny: ‘so how can ve onderstand zis nation of madmen?’ British audiences laughed smugly. The hero of that movie was a sleepy, gentlemanly don who suddenly turned up trumps in the anti-Nazi struggle, like a Percy ...”

“... garments’ – she has been raped by this time anyway. But she is being posed by Richardson in a passage like the following, and someone’s fantasies are being indulged. The marquis is not far away.    Her dress was white lustring, exceeding neat; but her stays seemed not tight-laced. I was told afterwards, that her laces had been cut, when she fainted ...”

“... attempt to consider all her work, he was publicly rebuked for it by Landfall’s former editor, Charles Brasch, who declared Ashton-Warner unworthy of such attention. That is not the end of the story, however. More books have followed including a novel set in London, Three, which is as economical as Incense to Idols is copious, and which is ...”

“... relationship to consciousness. Here, to give an example of hardcore Hofstadterismus, is a telling passage buried for the assiduous or serendipitous reader to spot in the bibliography: Gebstedter, Egbert B. Thetamagical Memas: Seeking the Whence of Letter and Spirit. Perth: Acidic Books, 1985. A curious pot-pourri, bloated and muddled – yet remarkably ...”

“... They are not referred to again, but they have their place, like the towns and caves in A Passage to India, to remind us that separations are of the order of existence. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ‘The Secret Sharer’ is one of the classic texts about duality and doubles. But as Miller’s book shows, the theme is often the more revealing the more ...”

“... for doing’, she has decided to allow the world to know all that she has to put up with. Prince Charles is a cad – he walks away when she flings herself head-first down the stairs, he mocks her when he finds her reading Jungian texts on death and holding the hands of dying friends, he is petulant about her popularity with the population. Worst of all is ...”

“... when it comes to Beyoglu. In 1939, ‘while new government offices were rising in Ankara,’ Charles King writes in Midnight at Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, ‘the Turkish government organised an international design competition to solicit proposals for solving the problem of Istanbul’s future development.’* The winner was Henri ...”