Search Results

“... out at Club Louise, a lesbian bar in Soho, danced to Abba and Diana Ross in the basement. Elvis Costello lifted the piano frills of ‘Dancing Queen’ for ‘Oliver’s Army’. Abba seemed to hark back to the early days of rock’n’roll, capturing its bubblegum paradox of disposability and durability, its youthful immediacy if not its charged ...”

“... document the biography. Once the book appeared, it was given short shrift in eminent quarters. Sir John Pope-Hennessy, writing in the life-enhancing Now!, described it as ‘tawdry’, while working up a tremendous lather of indignation at the impertinence of the whole enterprise. Professor Sidney Freedberg availed himself of the Boston Globe to lay about the ...”

“... compellingly ghastly ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, a sort of homage to John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) only denser and even more postmodernly whorled: ‘For whom is the Funhouse a house? … For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at ...”

“... that many of the other compounds sold were ‘worthless if not injurious’. Her rivals Madame Costello and Mrs Bird tended to use euphemisms in their marketing material: Costello’s ‘female monthly pill’, for example, helped suppress women’s ‘natural illness’. Restell, by contrast, boldly proposed her ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”