Search Results

“... and moderate? Master and slave? Dictator and compliant intellectual? (This was how C.L.R. James saw them in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, written during his detention on Ellis Island in 1952 and republished last year.) Or are they merely chalk and cheese? Would the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, which cast Ahab as a Hitler or a Stalin and ...”

“... that commanded by F.R. Leavis and the early graduates of Cambridge English, [D.W.] Harding, [L.C.] Knights, Q.D. Leavis and [Denys] Thompson – five authors who, in aggregate, wrote on virtually every topic that Scrutiny ever discussed. The second Scrutiny generation, led by [R.G.] Cox and Ford, was markedly more restricted in range.’ Ford ...”

“... too, are more discreetly signalled: to Dante, Villon, Chapman’s Homer, among others; to the King James Bible and, in ‘The Spoils’, his last big poem before ‘Briggflatts’, to an array of Arabic, Jewish and Persian materials – Bunting served in Persia during the war and later became the Times correspondent in Tehran, although he was expelled by ...”

“... sense of complexity, a bit like Gaia itself. (ANT, too, seems analogous to the complex system that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis intuited as they built out their hypothesis in the early 1970s.) The days of the garrulous sciences returning from the field, or the lab, to announce their findings about objects unable to speak for themselves were over. So was ...”

“... There is also the extra ‘e’ on Maud, the remarriageable reader of French novels in Henry James’s ‘The Story of It’: a quirk Oppen chose not to change in later editions. Yet the drift is clear and exhilarating, and there is a cold precision, no less exhilarating, in the way the poem gets where it’s going, in a single, almost coherent sentence ...”

“... for France was deep and dangerous. Like many of their kind, they never quite put it behind them. James Neugass, another American impelled to Spain by his convictions, fetched up in a world apart from the propaganda parlours frequented by the Orrs. War Is Beautiful, the diary of his five months as an ambulance driver (November 1937 to April 1938), is surely ...”

“... question. A better reply perhaps comes from an eminently corporate source: Sainsbury’s Jayn Harding, quoted by Winston. Of British consumers (you remember them – they’re the people who used to be citizens) she says: ‘They’re looking at it like “You’re playing around with my life and you don’t know for sure that you can play around with my ...”

“... with her writer parents and the people she met in their living room in New York: Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or ...”

“... radicals’ or royalists. It was Cairo’s arguments, and especially those of the Cairo staffer James Klugmann (CP, Cambridge, 1933), that prevailed with Churchill when the time came to choose which of the Yugoslav resistance movements, royalist or Communist, to back. Finally, though full of admiration for E.P., Conradi can’t agree that anybody ...”

“... same story in different settings. On hearing the word ‘commitment’, she sought refuge in Henry James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after all, was ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which ...”

“... the so-called ‘peace dividend’, he can’t forgive them a deeper vice. This was summarised by James Rubin, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State, when he described the British who dealt with Bosnia – Hurd and Rifkind to be sure, but one must also include David Owen and the Unprofor commander, General Sir Michael Rose – as ...”

“... then in Cuba; a couple of years in England, where he made a deep impression on Conrad, Henry James and others; final illness and death. The chief woman in Crane’s life, Cora Taylor, belongs to the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden ...”

“... and almost beautiful.’ There’s a moment in Rebel without a Cause, when Jim Stark (played by James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) climb up to an old Hollywood mansion that’s now lying empty. They pretend they’re going to live there together, with Jim and Judy as the ‘parents’ in this haunted house. Plato mimics an estate ...”

“... the many other times when leavis wanted to put someone down, the model for his prose was Henry James, than whom no stylist could be more ornate and mandarin. If he wished to Invoke the authority of a central critical tradition, he was adept at echoing Arnold. Coleridge or Samuel Johnson, as he did in his assault on C.P. Snow: ‘The peculiar quality of ...”