Search Results

“... did not dispel the rumours that, as a Republican governor anonymously remarked, ‘he’s like George W. Bush, but without the brains.’ When asked how old the earth is – a Creationist litmus test – Perry said he doesn’t have ‘any idea’: ‘I know it’s pretty old. So it goes back a long, long way.’ They could have picked Bobby Jindal, the ...”

“... pressed to his chin. Watching something out of the corner of his eye, he resembles a wolf, or a bird of prey. The picture could be a physiognomical paradigm of a conspirator, a machinator, a schemer, a Machiavel. It shows Campbell as those who don’t like him like to see him. When Campbell likes someone, he’ll describe him as a ‘good bloke’; the ...”

“... literally kissing Rayburn’s bald head, endlessly inviting them round so that his wife, Lady Bird, could give them good ole Southern cooking and rescue them from the loneliness they dreaded. ‘Loneliness breaks the heart,’ Rayburn used to say, ‘loneliness consumes people.’ With Rayburn and Russell as a base, LBJ built up his position in the ...”

“... rather extravagantly – is a set of views about black people that might put him on a par with George Wallace, a circumstance requiring you to suddenly un-imagine the noble lawyer, now no longer the decency machine who has long lived in your head as segregation’s mythic antidote. To some commentators, he is the same man, a Southern agrarian fighting ...”

“... brave attempt at a taxing subject. The opening pages of A Trick of the Light give us Wyn Douglas, George Grillet, and London. Douglas, marginal urban man, a fixer, a reporter, an intriguer, scurries about the underside of the city with plans for the dispossessed. George Grillet, 25, Anglo-French, vacationing in England ...”

“... they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he ...”

“... In an introduction to his Collected Film Poetry Tony Harrison recalls working with the director George Cukor on a ludicrously conceived and commercially unlucky movie version of Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and ...”

“... hôtelière between the Liffey and the Atlantic. Her good eye fixed on me like a cat’s on a bird, her glass eye amiably up to heaven, they say it was her late husband did it, I wouldn’t blame him. Her two fists holding up my account, twenty quid worth of bed, board and booze, her grip flexed for the rip. “I’ve just heard this minit,” she ...”

“... her, ‘when you decide to be a lady novelist, and get set to write a long novel by Proust out of George Eliot, and it won’t get up and walk.’ The author of The Virgin in the Garden was also 17 in 1953, but Frederica Potter is not A.S. Byatt – even if subsequent novels have shown her giving up the same dissertation (on 17th-century religious ...”

“... not even Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket or Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon, which were among the National Gallery’s most remarkable recent acquisitions. Dickens was certainly familiar with the paintings of Charles Eastlake, the keeper of the National Gallery between 1843 and 1847. Eastlake was the leading British ...”

“... 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical assistant to John Hunter at St George’s Hospital. Although Jenner returned to his Berkeley medical practice in 1773, Hunter had recognised Jenner’s scientific prowess and encouraged him in his research. ‘Why think – why not try the experiment,’ he wrote in 1775. Hunter’s patronage ...”

“... poetry, if more pictorial in emphasis – the caligrams form images of a bunch of flowers and a bird, or the head and front legs of a horse. As Guy Davenport pointed out in the 1980s in an essay terribly entitled ‘Transcendental Satyr’, Cummings’s ‘eccentric margins, capricious word divisions, vagrant punctuation, tmeses and promiscuously embracing ...”

“... seemed to be a camouflage for some great dark secret she was hoarding ... like a snake to a bird’, and Ian Stewart’s wife dismissing the Stones’ second manager Allen Klein as ‘a cross between a New York gangster and an undernourished wrestler’. Wyman could never have taken away this detail of the Sixties: Andrew Oldham going to New York’s ...”

“... only about Penelope. It is called ‘The World as Meditation’ and has an epigraph in French from George Enesco, saying that his meditation, ‘the essential exercise of the composer’, was uninterrupted, ‘a permanent dream’. Penelope is the thought that precedes and underlies composition; meditation is Penelope waiting for a man who does and does not ...”

“... was a moment that was unreal and that we were just characters in a play,’ Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, noted. More than any past presidential transition, Kennedy’s death and funeral, along with Johnson’s ascension to office, became a made-for-TV drama. Beginning with the first reports that Kennedy had been shot and up until the funeral three days ...”