Search Results

“... him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, The Indignant Generation, was a formidable history of black ...”

“... toward something ‘other than imagery – towards narrative’. Having broken a taboo with his frank and sometimes repellent account of his feelings for his parents, Guibert is now free to launch into his most horrendous book, Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes, a nightmarish, stomach-turning récit about capturing and torturing children. The title ...”

“... masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small ...”

“... of the music into the life which is most damaging to the music. Hence, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge reflects ‘all the conflicting states of mind Britten was experiencing while he composed it’, even down to his ‘delight in discovering the Suffolk countryside’ ‘Peter Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned ...”

“... Lowell made changes to the book as a result of this letter, but he left the sections quoted above. Frank Bidart wrote in his notes to the poems: ‘Lowell responded by fundamentally changing the book. Several of the poems in Hardwick’s voice were muted by taking them out of direct quotation, placed in italics, their anguish and anger softened.’ Lowell ...”

“... it was to do? He solved that problem by engaging three Kingsmen, F.E. Adcock, Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch, who had worked in the First World War in Room 40at the Admiralty. They at once recruited ten more Kingsmen as well as other Cambridge dons and some German linguists. The most fertile fields they reaped were those of the Classics and Ancient ...”

“... Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it ...”

“... as a language of diffusion, inattention, that he inhabits like Daffy Duck in Hollywood. His friend Frank O’Hara once grumbled that Ashbery was ‘always marrying the whole world’; charmingly, the poem ‘Houseboat Days’ itself admits that ‘The mind/Is so hospitable, taking in everything/Like boarders.’ Hence my reference to Hollywood, the chaotic ...”

“... or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the poet ...”

“... nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in 1918, records Joyce expressing his aim ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my ...”

“... in 1945, ‘to end the war in plain clothes writing. I remember at the start of it writing to Frank Pakenham that its value to us would be to show us finally that we are not men of action. I took longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy ...”

“... or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad behaviour against the extraordinary labour she devoted to transcribing, editing and promoting Dickinson’s work. It also chronicles the trials ...”

“... workers feel ‘engaged’.It’s fitting​ that the first mention of something like UBI comes in Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516. Let’s stop hanging thieves, one of More’s characters argues: ‘Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody is under the ...”

“... of contemporary events for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its ...”

“... of the diaspora, of ‘Russia Abroad’, that strange in-between place where, as Semyon Frank said, one had to ‘live and breathe in a vacuum’.‘Zhivago’, in the pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s first page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’ the mourners are ...”